Thus there result certain fundamentaland primarydeterminations (the next following opposite will make clear these expressions, which I entreat you to consider maturely,) of our life, as its true roots, which make and continue themselves, and to which we only need to surrenderourselves and allow them to take hold of our being, in order to appropriate them and make them our actual life; and the continuous chain whereof, no matter if they are dropped at certain links, can always be arbitrarily taken hold of again, and be supplied backward or forward from every point.

I say we only need to surrenderourselves to them, for even these fundamental determinations cannot pullus irresistibly towards them; we having, moreover, the faculty to pull ourselves (a fact which was forgotten in those determinations) loose again from them, and to create freely out of ourselves a higher series of life and actuality for ourselves. We can, for instance, think and seize ourselves as the knowingin that fundamental consciousness, or as the livingin that fundamental life; or we can rise to the seconddegree of life, if we call the remaining within the fundamental determinations the firstdegree of life; or we may again seize ourselves as the thinkingin that thinking of original knowledge, as the contemplatingof our own life in that positing of it, which would result in a third degree of life; and so on ad infinitum.

The whole distinction between that first degree and the higher degrees, between the previously given life—which was presented to us, and which we need only to accept in order to make it our actual life—and that life which is not given to us, but which must be produced by our self-activity, is probably this: that from each of the higher degrees you can look down and descend into a lower one; whereas from the lowest one you cannot look down, because it is itself the deepest, and cannot go lower except into the realm of nothingness; that hence we are conditioned in regard to the descentby the lowest one, but not in regard to the ascentthrough reflection; and that this lowest one is, therefore, the real foot and root of all other life. Hence, I called it the primary and fundamental determination of all life.

For us, let it be here sufficient, conformably to our agreement, to consider this sphere of the first degree as the sphere of such fundamental determinations of our life, but on no account as the sphere of things in and for themselves, a view which we here discard. Be they ever so much the latter, in and for themselves, for us they exist only as determinations of our life, or by our living and experiencing them, and we are content here to speak of them only in relation to us. The content of this sphere is often more specially called reality, fact of consciousness, or experience.

Know, reader, that hereafter we shall reflect solely upon this system of the first degree. Do not forget this for a single moment, but separate whatsoever belongs to the higher degrees from it.

I include in this system of the first degree all that which we perceive through our external senses in space, or through our internal sense in our soul. In regard to the latter, this sphere includes also what I have termed higher degrees, not as regards their content, but as regards their form, namely: the laws which it observes, for these laws belong to the facts of the internal sense, and are perceived when we carefully observe ourselves in those proceedings of the soul.

The chief object of the present conversation, my reader, was this: that you should (but quite arbitrarily, and only to suit my future purpose,) separate all the occurrences of your consciousness into two classes, and should clearly comprehend the distinction of what belongs to the one and what to the other class; that you should separate that which is product of freedom, and which therefore belongs to the higher classes, and should look to that only which I have called the first degree. Only in so far as you have clearly seen this distinction, and hold to it, can you correctly seize that which will be the subject of our other conversations.

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