| Summary: | "Fichte's system of philosophy sets out from the category of quality and proceeds towards the category of freedom, demonstrating at every step that self-activity is the foundation of the qualitative and showing how the qualitative comes to arise from the self-active. Being or existence is not a sort of quiescent substrate underlying all manner of activity, but the very substance of being itself is pure activity. Having shown how the appearance of being and the qualitative arises in the mind through the process of self-activity, Fichte has completed his theory of the intellect and arrived at the beginning of his theory of the will. He calls this the Practical Part of the Science of Knowledge. It is this Practical Part of the Science of Knowledge which furnishes the standpoint of the present work. The one supreme fact in the universe, from Fichte's point of view, is the free will. To discuss this idea in its relation to civil society and the State, both of which institutions arise from the recognition of freedom as the most sacred object in the secular world, is the object of the book before us--"The Science of Rights," or of jurisprudence. The present work is a translation of Fichte's first sketch of the Philosophy of Rights which appeared in 1796 under the title: "Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre von Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Jena and Leipzig." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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