sense already done. He had influenced younger men who by that time had already transcended him.
This work had been, however, manifold and exacting. Fichte had a temperament at once logical and enthusiastic. The struggle between a keen and subtle intellect and a warm and imaginative emotional nature, had joined itself with outer hindrances to make his early years eventful and arduous. The son of a poor weaver, and one of a large family of children, Fichte chanced to attract, while yet a boy, the kindly attention of a nobleman, who adopted him, showed him a little of the great world, and then, suddenly dying, left him a penniless youth, only the more keenly ashamed, under such circumstances, of his poverty. At the university he supported himself by private teaching, was more than once near to despair in his neediness, and at length, after graduation, became a Hofmeister in a Zürich family. While here, in 1788, he met his future wife, a certain Johanna Rahn, a niece of the poet Klopstock. They were soon betrothed, but were too poor to marry until 1793.
Fichte’s since published love-letters to his betrothed are described, by those who have read them through (I have not), as somewhat pedantic — the natural product of a mind conscientious, learned, but impulsive, and so far at once flighty and even a little despondent. He is fond of accusing himself of many faults, laments his restlessness and unsteadiness of ideas and plans, knows no guiding star but her love, and wonders what Providence can be meaning with him. Meanwhile, during this period of his betrothal, he changed his position often and traveled much, looking for a permanent occupation, — a project-maker and an unpromising wanderer. In philosophy he was so far a sort of amateur Spinozist, and occupied a position to which he later looked back as one of darkness and of the gall of bitterness. Suddenly a change came. It was 1790, and he was now twenty-eight years old.
