While in Leipzig he undertook to give a young man private lessons in philosophy, and to that end took up for the first time the study of Kant. Very soon he wrote to Fräulein Rahn in an entirely new vein. It is a wonderful philosophy, this of Kant, he asserts. It tames a man’s wild imagination; it gives one “an indescribable elevation above all earthly affairs.” “I have obtained from it,” he continues, “a nobler ideal. I don’t concern myself so much now with outward things; I am busied within myself. Thence has come to me a peace that I have never before known. In the midst of my perplexing material situation, I have been enjoying the most blessed days of my experience. I mean to devote to this philosophy at least some years of my life. It is above all conception a difficult doctrine, and it deserves to be made easier. Its basis, to be sure, is a mass of head-splitting speculations that have no immediate bearing on human life, but the consequences are vastly important to an age which, like ours, is morally corrupt to the very source; and one would deserve well of his time if he made these consequences luminous to the world. Tell your dear father that he and I used to err in our investigations about the necessity of all man’s acts. . . . I have found out now that man’s will is free, and that not happiness, but worthiness is the end of our being. And I ask your pardon, too, that I used to teach you false doctrine about these things. Henceforth believe your own feeling, even if you can’t refute a sophist.”
One might wonder whether this confession to Johanna Rahn, of the superlative blessedness of days passed out of her company, and alone with the “Critique of Pure Reason,” might not have made her a trifle jealous of Kant; but in fact, as she was a person of both maturity and discretion, being four years the senior of Fichte himself, she wrote him that, since after all he appeared unable to earn his living, and since her father’s means were now apparently
