An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

This interpretation was at first put upon Fichte’s reasoning with such vigour that he was accused of atheism.  He was driven from his chair in Jena.  Only after several years was he called to a corresponding post in Berlin.  Later, in his Vocation of Man, he brought his thought to clearness in this form:  ’If God be only the object of thought, it remains true that he is then but the creation of man’s thought.  God is, however, to be understood as subject, as the real subject, the transcendent thinking and knowing subject, indwelling in the world and making the world what it is, indwelling in us and making us what we are.  We ourselves are subjects only in so far as we are parts of God.  We think and know only in so far as God thinks and knows and acts and lives in us.  The world, including ourselves, is but the reflection of the thought of God, who thus only has existence.  Neither the world nor we have existence apart from him.’

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born at Rammenau in 1762.  His father was a ribbon weaver.  He came of a family distinguished for piety and uprightness.  He studied at Jena, and became an instructor there in 1793.  He was at first a devout disciple of Kant, but gradually separated himself from his master.  There is a humorous tale as to one of his early books which was, through mistake of the publisher, put forth without the author’s name.  For a brief time it was hailed as a work of Kant—­his Critique of Revelation.  Fichte was a man of high moral enthusiasm, very uncompromising, unable to put himself in the place of an opponent, in incessant strife.  The great work of his Jena period was his Wissenschaftslehre, 1794.  His popular Works, Die Bestimmung des Menschen and Anweisung zum seligen Leben, belong to his Berlin period.  The disasters of 1806 drove him out of Berlin.  Amidst the dangers and discouragements of the next few years he wrote his famous Reden an die deutsche Nation.  He drew up the plan for the founding of the University of Berlin.  In 1810 he was called to be rector of the newly established university.  He was, perhaps, the chief adviser of Frederick William III in the laying of the foundations of the university, which was surely a notable venture for those trying years.  In the autumn of 1812 and again in 1813, when the hospitals were full of sick and wounded after the Russian and Leipzig campaigns, Fichte and his wife were unceasing in their care of the sufferers.  He died of fever contracted in the hospital in January 1814.

According to Fichte, as we have seen, the world of sense is the reflection of our own inner activity.  It exists for us as the sphere and material of our duty.  The moral order only is divine.  We, the finite intelligences, exist only in and through the infinite intelligence.  All our life is thus God’s life.  We are immortal because he is immortal.  Our consciousness is his consciousness.  Our life and moral force is his, the reflection and

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.