=The Influences upon Fichte’s Teaching.= Any estimate of the influences upon Fichte would be distorted that did not recognize the calibre of the man himself. Fichte was essentially a puritan reformer. He was impetuous and life-loving, but withal a simple-minded man. All the philosophical influences which he was capable of feeling would naturally be turned by him into ethical and religious sermons to reach the life of men. He must be thought of as the crusader armed with abstract truths, which he wields with a giant’s strength for the moral uplift of man. It was natural then that the two principal influences upon Fichte’s doctrine should be Spinoza and Kant. To be sure, such writers as Lessing, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi furnished him much material in his early years, and the Romanticists in his later years. His wife, Johanna Rahn, was also a source of power to him, and through her influence after their marriage his aim became clearer and his character lost much of its harshness. But the two great influences upon Fichte were the two great philosophical forces of this time, Spinoza and Kant. Fichte’s philosophy has been described as “Spinoza in terms of Kant,” and also as “an inverted or idealistic Spinozism.” The influence of Spinoza upon Fichte’s thought is seen at both ends of his life. At the beginning he was an amateurish Spinozist. He found that the theological training of his boyhood was a necessitarianism like Spinozism. He lost his faith in Christianity, and he was unhappy because he found Spinoza’s doctrine of necessity was intolerable and yet unanswerable. Then he read Kant and found a solution of his difficulty without having to change the doctrine of Spinoza. For Kant had placed behind the necessitated world the free spirit. In the last period of Fichte’s life the influence of the mystical side of Spinozism appeared, through Fichte’s intercourse with the Romanticists in Berlin.