A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Hamann and Herder, and on grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus; but the more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as he. In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who began in authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater scandal than the Master had done. Fichte's whole career is a kind of "abstract and brief chronicle" of the movements of thought in Germany during his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents. "Books imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained, and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing, and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way within the walls, and were eagerly studied." [1474] In particular, Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze; and Lessing's lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought, as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker, Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once determinism and a belief in "Providence," accepting Spinoza and contemplating a village pastorate. [1475] But while ready to frame a plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to "the sinner," he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight, declaring that "no purely Christian community now exists." [1476] About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason, and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend that "Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor proved it," and that he himself has "discovered a new principle, from which all philosophy can easily be deduced.... In a couple of years we shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical demonstration." [1477] He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza's influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant's anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant's reiterated doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that "it is only a corrupt society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action." But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his "wander-years" he writes with vehemence of the "worse than Spanish inquisition" under which the German clergy are compelled to "cringe and dissemble," partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need. [1478] In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ("Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation"), published with some difficulty, Kant helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and, in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they had shown, concludes that belief in revelation "is an element, and an important element, in the moral education of humanity, but it is not a final stage for human thought." [1479] In Kant's bi-frontal fashion, he had professed [1480] to "silence the opponents of positive religion not less than its dogmatical defenders"; but that result did not follow on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that he ever told his students at Jena: "In five years there will be no more Christian religion: reason is our religion"; [1481] and it would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were purely malicious. [1482] But his career henceforth was one of strife and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years' War, and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings, accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre ("Doctrine of Knowledge," 1794-95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his rupture steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused of atheism in print; and after a defence in which he retorted the charge on the utilitarian theists he resigned. In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of the Gods were the Gods' affair, he found harbourage; and sought to put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung des Menschen ("The Vocation of Man," 1800), wherein he speaks of the Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason is right--the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels; while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic, wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and "could hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of it." [1483] A few years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling; and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist "for his own hand," who rejected all current religion while angrily dismissing current unbelief as "freethinking chatter." [1484] If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of Spinoza. [1485] That he was conscious of a vital sunderance between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer, in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their "religious feeling" (Religiosität). His retort is that a new religious feeling has taken the place of the old; [1486] and that was the position taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner, as the last had sworn by Kant. But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all rising out of the "Illumination" of the eighteenth century, have been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted on "putting something in the place" of the untenable systems of the past. They have been but so many "toppling spires of cloud." Fichte, like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher [1487] and developing Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical, and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.