On New Year's Eve of 1795 students belonging to the fraternities attacked Fichte's house, breaking windows and heaping insults upon him and his wife. In the early months of 1795 Fichte felt his life to be in danger and found it necessary to reside outside of Jena until the tempers of the fraternity members had calmed down.
The Offending Articles
The Atheismusstreit itself began in 1798 with the publication in the Philosophisches Journal, a periodical of which Fichte was coeditor, of an essay by Forberg titled "The Evolution of the Nature of Religion." Fichte's conservative English biographer, Robert Adamson, dismisses Forberg's position as an "exaggeration of the dismal rationalism into which the weaker Kantians had drifted." In fact, however, Forberg's paper shows a powerful and independent thinker at work and does not seem dated even now. (Interestingly enough, Hans Vaihinger called attention to the philosophical merits of Forberg's work after almost total neglect for a century, citing him as an early positivistic fictionalist and praising his unusually fine appreciation of the more radical aspects of Kant's philosophy of religion.)
What, Forberg asks, is the foundation of the belief in a moral world order? There are three possible sources—experience, speculation, and conscience.
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