FICHTE. Easter, 1792, the name of its author was by oversight omitted from the title page, together with the preface, which had been furnished after the rest of the book ; and as the anonymous work was universally ascribed to Kant (whose religious philosophy was at this time eagerly looked for), the young writer became famous at a stroke as soon as the error was explained. A second edition was issued as early as the following year. After his marriage in Zurich, where he had completed several political treatises (the address, Reclamation of the Freedom of Thought from the Princes of Europe, who have hitherto suppressed it, Heliopolis in the Last Year of the Old Darkness, and the two Hefte, Contributions toward the Correction of the Public fudgment on the French Revolution, 1793), Fichte accepted, in 1794, a call to Jena, in place of Reinhold, who had gone to Kiel, and whose popularity was soon exceeded by his own. The same year saw the birth of the Wissenschaftslehre. His stay in Jena was embittered by conflicts with the clergy, who took offense at his ethical lectures {On the Vocation of the Scholar) held on Sunday mornings (though not at an hour which interfered with church service), and with the students, who, after they had been untrue to their decision — which they had formed as a result of these lectures — to dissolve their societies or orders, gave vent to their spite by repeatedly smashing the win- dows of Fichte's residence. Accordingly he took leave of absence, and spent the summer of 1795 in Osmannstadt. The years 1796-98, in which, besides the two Introduc- tions to the Science of Knowledge, Xht Natural Right and the Science of Ethics (one of the most all important works in German philosophical literature) appeared, mark the culmination of Fichte's famous labors. The so-called atheistic controversy* resulted in Fichte's departure from Jena. The Philosophise hes Journal, which since 1797 had been edited by Fichte in association with Niethammer, had published an article by Magister Forberg, rector at Saal- feld, entitled " The Development of the Concept of Reli- gion," and as a conciliating introduction to this a short essay by Fichte, "On the Ground of our Belief in a Divine Gov-
- Cf. Karl August Hase, Jenaisches Fichtebiichlein, 1856.
