Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in Ramenau, Oberlausitz, May 19, 1762, the son of a poor weaver. Through the generosity of a nobleman, the gifted lad was enabled to follow his intellectual bent; after attending the schools at Meissen and Schulpforta he studied theology at the universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg with the purpose of entering the ministry. His poverty frequently compelled him to interrupt his studies by accepting private tutorships in families, so that he never succeeded in preparing him self for the examinations. In 1790 he became acquainted with Kant's philosophy, which two students had asked him to expound to them, and to which he now devoted himself with feverish zeal. It revolutionized his entire mode of thought and determined the course of his life. The anonymous publication of his book, Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation, in 1792, written from the Kantian point of view and mistaken at first for a work of the great criticist, won him fame and a professorship at Jena (1794). Here, in the intellectual centre of Germany, Fichte became the eloquent exponent of the new idealism, which aimed at the reform of life as well as of Wissenschaft; he not only taught philosophy, but preached it, as Kuno Fischer has aptly said. During the Jena period he laid the foundations for his "Science of Knowledge" (Wissenschaftslehre) which he presented in numerous works: The Conception of the Science of Knowledge, 1794; The Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge, 1794; The Foundation of Natural Rights, 1796; The System of Ethics, 1798—(all these translated by Kroeger); the two Introductions to the Science of Knowledge, 1797 (trans. by Kroeger in Journal of Speculative Philosophy). The appearance of an article Concerning the Ground of our Belief in a Divine World-Order, 1798, in which Fichte seemed to identify God with the moral world-order, brought down upon him the charge of atheism, against which he vigorously defended himself in his Appeal to the Public and a series of other writings. Full of indignation over the attitude which his government assumed in the matter, be offered his resignation (1799) and removed to Berlin, where he presented his philosophical notions in popular public lectures and in writings which were characterized by clearness, force, and moral earnestness rather than by their systematic form. There appeared: The Vocation of Man, 1800 (translated by Dr. Smith); A Sun-Clear Statement concerning the Nature of the New Philosophy, 1801 (trans. by Kroeger in Journal of Speculative Philosophy); The Nature of the Scholar, 1806 (trans. by Smith); Characteristics of the Present Age, 1806 (trans. by Smith); The Way towards the Blessed Life, 1806 (trans. by Smith). After the overthrow of Prussia by Napoleon, in 1806, Fichte fled from Berlin to Königsberg and Sweden, but returned when peace was declared in 1807, and delivered his celebrated Addresses to the German Nation, 1807-08, in which he sought to arouse the German people to a consciousness of their national mission and their duty even while the French army was still occupying the Prussian capital.

Fichte was appointed professor of philosophy (1810) in the new University of Berlin, for which he had been invited to construct a plan and in the establishment of which he took a lively interest. During the last period of his life he devoted himself to the development of his thoughts in systematic form and wrote a number of books; most of these were published after his death, which occurred January 27, 1814. Among them we mention: General Outline of the Science of Knowledge, 1810 (trans. by Smith); The Facts of Consciousness, 1813; Theory of the State, published 1820. The Complete Works, edited by his son, J.H. Fichte, appeared 1843-46. New editions of particular works are now appearing.

The world for Fichte is at bottom a spiritual order, the revelation of a self-determining ego or reason; hence the science of the ego, or reason, the Wissenschaftslehre, is the key to all knowledge, and we can understand nature and man only when we have caught the secret of the self-active ego. Philosophy must, therefore, be Wissenschaftslehre, for in it all natural and mental sciences find their ultimate roots; they can yield genuine knowledge only when and in so far as they are based on the principles of the Science of Knowledge—mere empirical sciences having no real cognitive value. The ego-principle itself, however, without which there could be no knowledge, cannot be grasped by the ordinary discursive understanding with its spatial, temporal, and causal categories. Kant is right: if we were limited to the scientific intellect, we could never rise above the conception of a phenomenal order absolutely ruled by the causal law. But there is another source of knowledge: in an act of inner vision or intellectual intuition, which is itself an act of freedom, we become conscious of the universal moral purpose; the law of duty or the categorical imperative commands us to be free persons. We cannot refuse to accept this law without abandoning ourselves as persons, without conceiving ourselves as things, or mere products of nature; the choice of one's philosophy, therefore, depends upon what kind of man one is—upon one's values, upon one's will. The type of man who is a slave of things, who cannot raise himself out of the causal mechanism, who is not free, will never be able to conceive himself otherwise than as a cog in a wheel. Fichte accepts the ego, or spirit, as the ultimate and absolute principle, because it alone can give our life worth and meaning. Thus he grounds his entire philosophy upon a moral imperative which presents itself to the ego in an inner vision. He also tells us that we can become immediately aware of the pure activity of the ego, of our free action, in a similar act of intellectual intuition. But we cannot know this free act unless we perform it ourselves; no one can understand the idealistic philosophy who is not free; hence philosophy begins with an act of freedom—im Anfang war die Tat.

In order that we may rise to free action, opposition is needed, and this we get in the spatial-temporal world of phenomena, or nature, which the ego creates for itself in order to have resistance to overcome. Fichte conceives of nature as "the material of our duty," as the obstacle against which the ego can exercise its freedom. There could be no free action without something to act upon, and there could be no purposive action without a world in which everything happens according to law; and such a causal world we have in our phenomenal order, which is the product of the absolute spiritual principle. By the ego Fichte did not mean the subjective ego, the particular individual self with all its idiosyncrasies, but the universal ego, the reason that manifests itself in all conscious individuals as universal and necessary truth. In his earlier period he did not define his thought very carefully, but in time the absolute ego came to be conceived as the principle of all life and consciousness, as universal life, and ultimately identified with God. His philosophy is, therefore, not subjective idealism, although it was so misinterpreted, but objective idealism; nature is not the creation of the particular individual ego, but the phenomenal expression, or reflection, in the subject of the universal spiritual principle.

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