ce
for the autonomous personality in what _appeared to be_ a mechanical
universe, Kant gave voice to some of the deeper yearnings of the age.
The German Enlightenment, the new humanism, mysticism, pietism,
and the faith-philosophy were all interested in the human soul, and
unwilling to sacrifice it to the demands of a rationalistic science or
metaphysics. In seeking to rescue it, the great criticist, piloted by
the moral law, steered his course between the rocks of rationalism,
sentimentalism, and scepticism. It was his solution of the controversy
between the head and the heart that influenced Fichte, Schelling, and
Schleiermacher. They differed from Kant and among themselves in many
respects, but they all glorified the spirit, _Geist_, as the living,
active element of reality, and they all rejected the intellect as
the source of ultimate truth. They followed him in his
anti-intellectualism, but they did not avoid, as he did, the
attractive doctrine of an inner intuition; according to them we can
somehow grasp the supersensible in an inner experience which Fichte
called intellectual, Schelling artistic, Schleiermacher religious. The
bankruptcy of the intelligence was overcome in their systems by the
discovery of a faculty that revealed to them the living, dynamic
nature of the universe. They were all more or less influenced by the
romantic currents of the times, seeking with Herder and Jacobi an
approach to the heart of things other than through the categories
of logic. Like Lessing and Goethe, they were also attracted to
the pantheistic teaching of Spinoza, though rejecting its rigid
determinism so far as it might affect the human will. They likewise
accepted the idea of development which the leaders of German
literature, Lessing, Herder, and Goethe, had already opposed to the
unhistorical _Aufklaerung_, and which came to play such a prominent
part in the great system of Hegel.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in Ramenau, Oberlausitz, May 19, 1762,
the son of a poor weaver. Through the generosity of a nobleman,
the gifted lad was enabled to follow his intellectual bent; after
attending the schools at Meissen and Schulpforta he studied theology
at the universities of Jena, Leipzig, and Wittenberg with the purpose
of entering the ministry. His poverty frequently compelled him to
interrupt his studies by accepting private tutorships in families, so
that he never succeeded in preparing him self for the examinations. In
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