HUME TO HEGEL Fichte’s relaxed lecturing style marks a contrast with the dense nature of his prose including phenomenal individuals’ (Saămmtliche Werke, ed I H Fichte (Berlin, 18456), II 607) This sounds rather like God, and in his later, popular works Fichte went so far as to say: ‘It is not the Wnite self that exists, it is the divine Idea that is the foundation of all philosophy; everything that man does of himself is null and void All existence is living and active in itself, and there is no other life than Being, and no other Being than God.’ But elsewhere he said that it was superstitious to believe in any divine being that was anything more than a moral order Clearly, he was more of a pantheist than a theist Fichte’s philosophy of religion resembles that of Spinoza, as was pointed out by the most devoted of his disciples, F W J Schelling, who had become 110