HUME TO HEGEL was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was forty-two in the year of Kant’s death, and at the apogee of his own philosophical career Fichte was born into a poor family and was employed at an early age to herd geese His intellectual gifts caught the attention of a philanthropic baron, and he was able to study theology at the University of Jena, where he came to admire Lessing, Spinoza, and Kant His Wrst publication was a Critique of All Revelations (1792), written in the style of Kant so successfully that for a while it passed as the master’s own composition Kant denied authorship, but reviewed the work very favourably Partly through the inXuence of Goethe, Fichte was appointed to a professorship at Jena in 1794, where the great poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller was among his colleagues Fichte’s lectures were initially popular, but soon they were criticized by the students for being too puritanical and by the faculty for being insuYciently religious He was forced to leave the university in 1799, and was without a tenured academic post until in 1810 he became dean of the philosophy faculty in the new University of Berlin He was much involved in the resurgence of German nationalism during Napoleon’s European hegemony His Addresses to the German Nation, in 1808, rebuked the Germans for the disunity that led to their defeat by Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, and he served as a volunteer in the army of resistance in 1812 He died of typhus in 1814, caught from his wife who was a military nurse Fichte’s philosophical reputation rests on his Wissenschaftslehre of 1804 He saw the task of philosophy in Kantian terms as providing a transcendental account of the possibility of experience Such an account could start either from pure objectivity (the thing in itself) or free subjectivity (‘the I’) The former would be the path of dogmatism, and the latter the path of idealism Fichte rejected the Kantian solution to the Kantian problem, and abandoned any notion of a thing-in-itself He sought to derive the whole of consciousness from the free experience of the thinking subject Thus he made himself the uncompromising originator of German idealism What is this I from which all things Xow? Is it revealed by introspection? ‘I cannot take a pace, I cannot move hand or foot, without the intellectual intuition of my self-consciousness in these actions,’ Fichte said If the theory is that the individual self can create the whole material world, we seem to be faced with an unconvincing and unappetizing solipsism But this, Fichte insisted, is a misinterpretation ‘It is not the individual but the one immediate spiritual Life which is the creator of all phenomena, 109