animates all our thought and action—­it is life, love, blessedness.  And as quiet blessedness is here distinguished from ceaseless action, so for our thinker the inactive Deity, the self-identical life of the absolute, separates from the active universal reason, which in its individual organs advances from task to task.  The earlier undivided and unique principle, the absolute ego, divides into the Ichheit (moral law, world-order), and an absolute as the ground thereof.  “The spirit (the ego, or, as Fichte now prefers to say, knowledge) an image of God, the world an image of the spirit.”  The active order of the world (the moral law which realizes itself in individuals) the immediate, and objective reality the mediate, revelation of the absolute!

Does this view of religion, which Fichte incorporates also in the later expositions of the Science of Knowledge, indicate an abandonment and denial of the earlier standpoint?  The philosophy of Fichte’s second period is a new system—­so judge the majority of the historians of philosophy.  It is not a transformation, but a completion of the earlier system; the doctrine promulgated in Berlin continues to be idealistic, as that advanced in Jena had itself been pantheistic—­this is the opinion of Fortlage and Harms, in agreement with the philosopher himself and with his son.  Kuno Fischer, also, who shows a constant advance in the development of Fichteanism, a gradual transition “without a break,” may be counted among the minority who hold that throughout his life Fichte taught but one system.  We believe it our duty to adhere to this latter view.  The Science of Knowledge (the world a product of the ego) enters as it is into the later form of the Fichtean philosophy; the latter gives up none of the fundamental positions of the former, but only adds to it a culmination, by which the appearance of the building is altered, it is true, but not the edifice itself.  In the discussion of the question the following three have been emphasized as the most important points of distinction between the two periods:  In the earlier system God is made equivalent to the absolute ego and the moral order of the world, in the later he is separated from these and removed beyond them; in the former the nature of God is described as activity, in the latter, as being; in the one, action is designated as the highest mission of man, in the other, blessed devotion to God.  All three variations of the later doctrine from the earlier may be admitted without giving up the position that the former is only an extension of the latter and not an essential modification of it (i.e., in its teachings concerning the relation of the ego and the world).  Fichte experienced religious feelings the philosophical outcome of which he worked into his system.  He now knows a first thing (the Deity as distinct from the absolute ego) and a last thing (the inwardness of religious devotion to the world-ground), which he had before not overlooked,