Let us finally observe, that the object of external perception can never become ground or principle, as the Ego is, and as we have explained it to be, but only a causethrough its mere existence, as will appear hereafter. So far as the Ego is concerned, there is here a twofold relation. In regard to external perception the Ego is purely substance, and by no means principle or ground. The Ego is principle or ground solely in relation to the productions of its inner freedom, and it is only through its being thus a principle that it becomes also the substance of the knowing of these productions. This distinction will be very important hereafter.

Chapter 3

Concerning the Reproduction of External Perception

We have seen how through the discovery of freedom in reflection a power of imagination has sprung up. This power of imagination may, as we have seen, be applied to the reproduction of external perception, since it has already under its control all those elements that belong to such a reproduction; and it will be all the more proper here to consider imagination only as such a power of reproduction, since altogether free creations by its means appear as yet to be without end or meaning. In speaking of this reproduction we speak by no means of any new development of life, as we did in the case of reflection; for all the conditions of the possibility of such a reproduction are already furnished by reflection.

1. Consider this: such a reproduction is absolutely possible by virtue of the realized reflection. This possibility is standing, immanent in life, ever-present. How, then, does actuality distinguish itself from this possibility, and how am I ever to be impelled— always having possibility within my grasp—to add to it actuality? I answer: that possibility can consist at the utmost in a rule which is altogether a matter of thinking, whereas an actual fact under this rule would produce a contemplation. Hence possibility and actuality are here related to each other like free thinking and contemplation.

2. What, then, will be the presupposed rule of such a reproduction? External perception was a determined limitation of the external sense and the contemplation of space. The rule must be, therefore, a direction of the power of imagination to produce by its own activity an image of just that very same limitation. In the first instance, the limitation comes of itself without freedom. In the present instance, the power of imagination extends itself over the whole region of external sense and space, and is to give itself that determined limitation within this region. The fundamental condition of this free limitation is this, that the power of imagination should overlook the whole region, and have it well separated into classes and kinds,—for instance, the whole of the external sense into the five chief senses, and each of these again according to the chief distinctions of its limitations;—and the whole of the contemplation of space according to the possible limitations of figures, so that it may easily conform to a desired limitation according to a determined rule. The former, the classification, is necessary, so that nothing may be passed unnoticed; the second, a sharp distinction amongst the various determinations of the same sense, is necessary, in order that we may not fill up the image by that which is undetermined and confused instead of that which is strictly determined in perception. This latter distinction requires an acuteness of the senses with reference to sensuous qualities, which, it is true, is partly a natural gift; but which can also be voluntarily acquired by very strenuous attention, without which, after all, the mere natural gift is of no use.

3. This is the inner substance of the rule. But which, amongst the many qualities of perception, is the power of imagination to behold, in the image? Here we arrive at the external substance of the rule: the power of imagination is to be guided by the prototype of external perception. But how can it be so, since the external sense is not affected? for if it were, we should be speaking of a state of attention and not of reproduction. Evidently the power of imagination must be able to reawaken perception in its determined parts. By directing its attention to the important point imagination must be able to reproduce absolutely this point if it so chooses, and to reproduce it exactly as it was in the previous perception. Thus we arrive at another causality of imagination, through its mere being, than the one described above as occurring in a diseased condition of the Ego. And so it is in fact, as everyone can discover by observing himself.

Reality