III.
Meanwhile, the form which this doctrine takes in German thought is one dependent upon the special conditions of a very charming and a very wayward age, the age of German classical and romantic literature. Whether or no you find this sort of speculation in itself satisfactory, you will at all events be interested in watching with me, during the rest of this lecture and during the next, some of the more obvious and immediately human aspects of a time so full of fire, of imagination, of productiveness, of faults, of wanderings, and of glory. But let us proceed at once to the man who first embodied this new idealistic doctrine in a series of writings wherein the spontaneity, the eloquence, the confidence, the complexity, and the fragmentariness of the work done reflect very well the character of this period. I refer to Fichte.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the first of the great successors of Kant. He was a man three years younger than Schiller, thirteen years younger than Goethe, and thirty-eight years younger than Kant himself. The story of his life is one of ardor, poverty, high aims, brilliant literary success, bitter conflicts, and an untimely death in his country’s service. For at the close of his career, during the great war of liberation, in 1813, he and his devoted wife busied themselves in the encouragement of the warriors and in the care of the wounded. Fichte, as you see, had just passed the age of fifty. His wife, while nursing wounded soldiers, was stricken with typhus fever. She recovered, but the contagion had already passed to Fichte, to whom it proved fatal, in January, 1814. A nobler death, in a more heroic time, was scarcely possible to a professor of philosophy and a patriot. Fichte was spared the pain of seeing the darker years of national stagnation and of illiberalism in Germany, that followed the triumph over Napoleon. And for the rest, his work was in one
