Fichte was appointed professor of philosophy (1810) in the new
University of Berlin, for which he had been invited to construct a
plan and in the establishment of which he took a lively interest.
During the last period of his life he devoted himself to the
development of his thoughts in systematic form and wrote a number of
books; most of these were published after his death, which occurred
January 27, 1814. Among them we mention: _General Outline of
the Science of Knowledge_, 1810 (trans. by Smith); _The Facts of
Consciousness_, 1813; _Theory of the State_, published 1820. The
Complete Works, edited by his son, J.H. Fichte, appeared 1843-46. New
editions of particular works are now appearing.
The world for Fichte is at bottom a spiritual order, the revelation
of a self-determining ego or reason; hence the science of the ego, or
reason, the _Wissenschaftslehre_, is the key to all knowledge, and we
can understand nature and man only when we have caught the secret
of the self-active ego. Philosophy must, therefore, be
_Wissenschaftslehre_, for in it all natural and mental sciences find
their ultimate roots; they can yield genuine knowledge only when
and in so far as they are based on the principles of the Science of
Knowledge--mere empirical sciences having no real cognitive value.
The ego-principle itself, however, without which there could be no
knowledge, cannot be grasped by the ordinary discursive understanding
with its spatial, temporal, and causal categories.
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