These were in appearance the programme of a new educational Utopia; but their real purpose was so evident that the speaker lived in daily expectation of being summoned {103} before a French court-martial and shot. Unlike his countrymen, Goethe, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Fichte passionately resented the Napoleonic despotism, throwing himself heart and soul into the great uprising by which it was finally overthrown. Although his wish to accompany the victorious army as field preacher could not be gratified, the campaign of 1813 still claimed him as one of its victims. After nursing his heroic wife to recovery from a hospital fever caught in attendance on the sick and wounded at Berlin, he took the infection from her and died early in 1814, soon after hearing that Blücher had crossed the Rhine. G. H. Lewes, in a well-known story, has made himself and his readers merry over a German savant who undertakes to evolve the idea of a camel out of the depths of his moral consciousness. The phrase is commonly quoted as "inner consciousness," but this takes away its whole point. For the original satirist, who, I think, was not Lewes, but Heine, had in view the philosophy of Fichte. It need hardly be said that German savants are as careful observers and diligent collectors of facts as any others; and Fichte in particular trusted solely to experience for the knowledge of natural phenomena. But even as regards his general philosophy the place it gives to morality has been misconceived even by his closest students. With him goodwill really plays a less important part than with Kant, being not an end in itself, but a means towards an end. And what that end is his teaching makes quite clear.