but not so concerning the guaranties against the violation of the fundamental law of the state.  Instead of the division of powers recommended by Kant he demands supervision of the rulers of the state by ephors, who, themselves without any legislative or executive authority, shall suspend the rulers in case they violate the law, and call them to account before the community.  Every constitution in which the rulers are not responsible is despotic.  Fichte did not continue loyal to this principle, that the state is merely a legal institution.  He not only demands a state organization of labor by which everyone shall be placed in a position to live from his work, in the Natural Right and the Exclusive Commercial State, but, in his posthumous Theory of Right, 1812, he makes it the chief duty of the state to lead men, by the moral and intellectual training of the people, to do from insight what they have hitherto done from traditional belief.  Through the education of the people the empirical state is gradually to transform itself into the rational state.

%3.  Fichte’s Second Period:  his View of History and his Theory of Religion.%

Fichte’s transfer to Berlin brought him into more intimate contact with the world, and along with new experiences and new emotions gave him new problems.  While a vigorously developing religious sentiment turned his speculation to the relation of the individual ego to the primal source of spiritual life, empirical reality also acquired greater significance for him, and the intellectual, moral, and political situation of the time especially attracted his attention.  The last required philosophical interpretation, demanded at once inquiry into its historical conditions and a consideration of the means by which the glaring contradiction between the condition of the nation at the time and the ideals of reason could be diminished.  The Addresses to the German Nation outlined a plan for a moral reformation of the world, to start with the education of the German people;[1] while the Characteristics of the Present Age, which had preceded the Addresses, defined the place of the age in the general development of humanity.  The scheme of historical periods given in the Characteristics and similarly in the Theory of the State (innocence—­sin—­supremacy of reason, with intermediate stages between each two) is interesting as a forerunner of Hegel’s undertaking.

[Footnote 1:  “Among all nations you are the one in whom the germ of human perfection is most decidedly present.”  The spiritual regeneration of mankind must proceed from the German people, for they are the one original or primitive people of the new age, the only one which has preserved its living language—­French is a dead tongue—­and has raised itself to true creative poetry and free science.  The ground of distinction between Germanism and the foreign spirit lies in the question, whether we believe in an original element in man, in the freedom, infinite perfectibility, and eternal progress of our race, or put no faith in all these.]