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Updated: June 23, 2025
Through them we are enabled to enter into a life of monumental interest, wholly original and beyond the influence of anything exterior, an astonishing example of the autonomy of the ego, an imposing type of character, Zeno and Fichte in one. But still the motive power of this life is not religious; it is rather moral and philosophic.
One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of Germany even now, whether Herder's caustic contempt, and Bismarck's cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there. Fichte's lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself looked upon askance.
Any one can easily be convinced of this by comparing doctrines that seem to have no common point, no common measure, those of Fichte and Spencer for instance, two names that we happen to have just brought together.
The spark came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of the German people a large cultural fact. Fichte, like a true German, emphasized education as the means of progress: Arnim grasped the problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on those sprung from the soil.
The moderate and luminous views of the younger Fichte, who probably also first introduced the now current term “the unconscious,” must be at least briefly mentioned.
Or at best, if he belong to the prosaic provinces, he may be a "Hodman;" Fichte even calls him elsewhere a "Nonentity," and has in short no mercy for him, no wish that he should continue happy among us! This is Fichte's notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean.
They either jot down their thoughts bit by bit, in short, ambiguous, and paradoxical sentences, which apparently mean much more than they say, of this kind of writing Schelling's treatises on natural philosophy are a splendid instance; or else they hold forth with a deluge of words and the most intolerable diffusiveness, as though no end of fuss were necessary to make the reader understand the deep meaning of their sentences, whereas it is some quite simple if not actually trivial idea, examples of which may be found in plenty in the popular works of Fichte, and the philosophical manuals of a hundred other miserable dunces not worth mentioning; or, again, they try to write in some particular style which they have been pleased to take up and think very grand, a style, for example, par excellence profound and scientific, where the reader is tormented to death by the narcotic effect of longspun periods without a single idea in them, such as are furnished in a special measure by those most impudent of all mortals, the Hegelians ; or it may be that it is an intellectual style they have striven after, where it seems as though their object were to go crazy altogether; and so on in many other cases.
For the two former as many worlds exist as there are individual spirits, their harmony being guaranteed, in the one case, by the consistency of God's working, and, in the other, by his foresight. For Fichte, on the other hand, there is but one world, for the absolute is not outside the individual spirits, but the uniformly working force within them.
They likewise accepted the idea of development which the leaders of German literature, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had already opposed to the unhistorical Aufklärung, and which came to play such a prominent part in the great system of Hegel. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in Ramenau, Oberlausitz, May 19, 1762, the son of a poor weaver.
But first Fichte, and then Friedrich August Wolf, attracted him far more powerfully than Schleiermacher. Whenever he spoke of Wolf his calm features glowed and his blind eyes seemed to sparkle.
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