and, if one wants to be frank, of the petty also, in the rest of his life. Accused of atheism in 1799, the heroic, but lamentably indiscreet man replied to an unjust charge in so violent and unhappy a fashion as to make him thenceforth impossible at Jena, so that even the chief patron of liberal culture and free thought in Germany, Goethe’s own duke at Weimar, had regretfully, and by Goethe’s personal advice, to dismiss him from his chair. Then followed, however, the Berlin career, with its noble ending. Later years, indeed, in some respects mellowed Fichte; but to the end he was always a fighter, and a man of books as well, with all the faults of both these species, with a temperament whose lofty heroism and true piety could not save it from an appearance of polemical narrowness and furious self-assertion whenever he was in an actual conflict with any man or party. In argument Fichte is, so to speak, all temperament. His dialectic is indeed keen, his analysis is deep and searching, his sense of the unity of all science is profoundly rational; but deeper than all is the strong sense of his own personality, the love of making articulate his own character, which led him to say with truth, but with a peculiar and individual strength of accent: “What system of philosophy you hold depends wholly upon what manner of man you are.” Hence, in all his lengthy and frequently very technical writings, he after all never merely argues; he appeals to more than your understanding; he appeals to your honor, to your dignity of soul, to agree with his system. He would not merely convince you; he would convert you from an error which, as he feels, shows in you a defect of character. Goethe used to say that, by way of amusement, he occasionally read Fichte, “just to let myself be abused by him for a little while.” Meanwhile, Fichte abused frankly his own early blindness, before Kant came into his soul, with all the ardor of the ransomed convert. What Kant had ransomed him from was Spinozism, and
