1807, and delivered his celebrated _Addresses to the German Nation_,
1807-08, in which he sought to arouse the German people to a
consciousness of their national mission and their duty even while the
French army was still occupying the Prussian capital.

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. Kant is right: if
we were limited to the scientific intellect, we could never rise above