THE BEAUTY of Fichte’s style is often striking, and, in or out of Germany, he is seldom equaled in coherency of expression. The charge so often brought against other German philosophers, that in their anxiety to express thought with accuracy they frequently become uncouth, does not lie against him, for the earnestness of his love for truth, his depth of admiration for the sublime and beautiful in morals and in nature, molds his sentences into harmony, and adds to his metaphysics the great power of eloquence. His metaphysical treatises and philosophical essays are the work of a poet and an orator, deeply moved by his own thought and by the anxious hope of persuading others to accept it as a means of helping themselves to attain higher modes of existence and of usefulness.

  He was born at Rammenau in Upper Lusatia, May 19th, 1762, in the humblest circumstances. His father was a poor ribbon-weaver, but the family seems to have had, as an inheritance, the traits of intellectuality which Fichte displayed at a very early age. Fortunately for the world, they were developed in his case by the education he was enabled to acquire by his acquaintance with Freiherr Von Miltitz, a German nobleman who immortalized himself by helping the ribbon-weaver’s son to prepare himself for the university. On the death of his patron, Fichte, supporting himself by teaching and writing, continued to strive for higher education until after many hardships and vicissitudes he won, in 1794, the recognition of appointment to the chair of Philosophy in the University of Jena. This, which carried with it authority in the entire world of learning, was hastened by the admiration Kant had publicly expressed for Fichte’s first published philosophical work,—the “Kritik aller Offenbarung.” In 1799 he was forced out of his position at Jena on a charge of unorthodoxy, and in the same year he went to Berlin, where he made his home until his death, January 27th, 1814. During the latter part of his life, 1809–14, he filled the chair of Philosophy in the University of Berlin. He delivered a series of lectures at Erlangen and visited Copenhagen, but Berlin which received when Jena rejected him is entitled to the credit of his work more fully than any other city in Germany. It is in a Berlin churchyard that he lies buried, and on the monument which marks his grave is inscribed the highest tribute any man can receive from those he leaves behind him:—