Topics of the lecture:

1. Restatement of Kant's General Doctrine.

2. A possible transformation of Kant's World: First Statement of the Idealism common to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and of its relation to Christianity.

3. Fichte's Fortunes and Character.

4. Fichte's Subjective Idealism.

5. His Book on the "Vocation of Man."

[Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in 1762, was a student in Leipzig and Jena from 1780 to 1784, was private tutor thereafter, and lived in great poverty, until 1794, when he was called to a professorship in Jena, as a result of his first book, published in 1792. In 1799 he was removed from his professorship on a charge of atheism, but was afterwards active, as a professor, at the new University of Berlin until his death in 1814. His publications were numerous. Of his best works the most popular, translated by William Smith, have been published in several editions by Trubner and Co. (3d ed., London, 1873, in one vol.) Fichte's "Science of Knowledge" has been expounded by Professor E. C. Everett in the series called "Grlgg's Philosophical Classics" (Chicago, 1884). On this whole period, in its general aspects, a very useful book, in the German, is the History of Literature, by Julian Schmidt.]