Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born at Rammenau, in Upper Lusatia, 1762. A nobleman of Silesia became interested in the boy, and having committed him first to the instruction of a clergyman, he afterwards placed him at the high school at Schulpforte. In his eighteenth year, at Michaelmas, 1780, Fichte entered the university at Jena to study theology. He soon found himself attracted to philosophy, and became powerfully affected by the study of Spinoza. His pecuniary circumstances were straitened, but this only served to harden his will and his energy. In 1784 he became employed as a teacher in a certain family, and spent some time in this occupation with different families in Saxony. In 1787 he sought a place as country clergyman, but was refused on account of his religious opinions. He was now obliged to leave his fatherland, to which he clung with his whole soul. He repaired to Zurich, where, in 1788, he took a post as private tutor, and where also he became acquainted with his future wife, a sister’s daughter of Klopstock. At Easter, 1790, he returned to Saxony and taught privately at Leipsic, where he became acquainted with the Kantian philosophy, by means of lessons which he was obliged to give to a student. In the spring of 1791 we find him as private tutor at Warsaw, and soon after in Konigsberg, where he resorted, that he might become personally acquainted with the Kant he had learned to revere. Instead of a letter of recommendation he presented him his “_Critick of all Revelation_,” a treatise which Fichte composed in eight days. In this he attempted to deduce, from the practical reason, the possibility of a revelation. This is not seen purely apriori, but only under an empirical condition; we must consider humanity to be in a moral ruin so complete, that the moral law has lost all its influence upon the will and all morality is extinguished. In such a case we may expect that God, as moral governor of the world, would give man, through the sense, some pure moral impulses, and reveal himself as lawgiver to them through a special manifestation determined for this end, in the world of sense. In such a case a particular revelation were a postulate of the practical reason. Fichte sought also to determine apriori the possible content of such a revelation. Since we need to know nothing but God, freedom, and immortality, the revelation will contain naught but these, and these it must contain in a comprehensible form, yet so that the symbolical dress may lay no claim to unlimited veneration. This treatise, which appeared anonymously in 1792, at once attracted the greatest attention, and was at first universally regarded as a work of Kant. It procured for its author, soon after, a call to the chair of philosophy at Jena, to succeed Reinhold, who then went to Kiel. Fichte received this appointment in 1793 at Zurich, where he had gone to consummate his marriage. At the same time he wrote and published, also anonymously, his “_Aids to correct views of