OF THE GOOD. 



165 



young minds out of the state of depression and degrada- 

 tion into which Germany had been plunged through all 

 the disintegrating agencies which had been at work for 

 two centuries alike in politics, society, thought, and 

 literature, but out of which also a new world of faith 

 and hope was then springing up. And the success of 

 Fichte's endeavour became evident by the fact that the 

 closing years of the eighteenth century witnessed under 

 his influence at Jena, that reform of German student 

 life with its ideal of academic freedom which has become 

 such an important power for good all through the nine- 

 teenth century and a characteristic trait in German 

 culture. 



In addition to this deeper personal and moral influ- 

 ence which Fichte exerted, his doctrine acquired popular 

 notoriety through its bearings on the religious question, 

 which were pushed into the foreground through the 

 polemics and controversies 1 in which Fichte was entangled 

 during that period, and which ended in his removal 

 from Jena. With his departure the moral rigorism, 

 the severity peculiar to Kant's and though to a smaller 

 extent to his own 2 ethical views, gave way, at Jena, 



1 This was the notorious Atheis- 

 mus-Streit. 



2 Kant had, especially in his 

 later writings, included the doc- 

 trine of a radical evil propensity 

 in human nature a doctrine 

 which we have seen was repellent 

 to Schiller, though he did not feel 

 able to disprove it. With Fichte 

 this propensity acquires a different 

 meaning ; he liberates himself from 

 the inherited theological view which 

 has been pointed out as still lurk- 

 ing in Kant's ethical system. Fichte, 

 though a stern and uncompromising 



character, was, after all, much more 

 a man of general culture, and had 

 moved in very different circles 

 and come under the influence of 

 many interests which stirred that 

 age but which did not touch 

 Kant. Probably even greater than 

 the influence of the poetical sur- 

 roundings in Jena and Weimar was 

 that of Jacobi and Spinoza. It 

 was Spinozism which formed the 

 intellectual bond, if such existed 

 at all, between him and Goethe, and 

 gave to the whole of his speculation 

 a direction quite different from that 



