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of the movements of thought in Germany during his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents.
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Books imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained, and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing, and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way within the walls, and were eagerly studied. [1474] In particular, Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze; and Lessing's lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought, as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker, Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once determinism and a belief in
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Providence, accepting Spinoza and contemplating a village pastorate. [1475] But while ready to frame a plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to
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he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight, declaring that
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[1476] About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason, and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend that
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Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor proved it, and that he himself has
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[1477] He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza's influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant's anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant's reiterated doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that
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he writes with vehemence of the
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under which the German clergy are compelled to
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partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need. [1478] In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (
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Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation ), published with some difficulty, Kant helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and, in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they had shown, concludes that belief in revelation
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[1479] In Kant's bi-frontal fashion, he had professed [1480] to
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; but that result did not follow on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that he ever told his students at Jena:
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In five years there will be no more Christian religion: reason is our religion ; [1481] and it would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were purely malicious. [1482] But his career henceforth was one of strife and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years' War, and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings, accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre (
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Doctrine of Knowledge,