He showed remarkable ability from an early age, and it was owing to his reputation among the villagers that he gained the opportunity for a better education than he otherwise would have received.

The story runs that the Freiherr von Miltitz, a country landowner, arrived too late to hear the local pastor preach.

[16] In early 1788, he returned to Leipzig in the hope of finding a better employment, but eventually he had to settle for a less promising position with the family of an innkeeper in Zürich.

After a disappointing interview on 4 July of the same year,[26] he shut himself in his lodgings and threw all his energies into the composition of an essay which would attract Kant's attention and interest.

In a letter to Karl Reinhold, Jens Baggeson wrote that it was "...the most shocking and astonishing news... [since] nobody but Kant could have written this book.

"[28] Kant waited seven years to a make public statement about the incident; after considerable external pressure he dissociated himself from Fichte.

Stirred by the events and principles of the French Revolution, he wrote and anonymously published two pamphlets which led to him to be seen as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes.

These lectures were later published under the title The Vocation of the Scholar (Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten).

He had been accused of this in 1798 after publishing the essay "Ueber [sic] den Grund unsers [sic] Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung" ("On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance"), written in response to Friedrich Karl Forberg's essay "Development of the Concept of Religion", in his Philosophical Journal.

[17] In April 1800, through the introduction of Hungarian writer Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, he was initiated into Freemasonry in the Lodge Pythagoras of the Blazing Star, where he was elected minor warden.

[32] Fichte presented two lectures on the philosophy of Masonry during the same period as part of his work on the development of various higher degrees for the lodge in Berlin.

[33] In November 1800, Fichte published The Closed Commercial State: A Philosophical Sketch as an Appendix to the Doctrine of Right and an Example of a Future Politics (Der geschlossene Handelsstaat.

Ein philosophischer Entwurf als Anhang zur Rechtslehre und Probe einer künftig zu liefernden Politik), a philosophical statement of his property theory, a historical analysis of European economic relations, and a political proposal for reforming them.

The Battle of Jena-Auerstedt in 1806, in which Napoleon defeated the Prussian army, drove him to Königsberg for a time, but he returned to Berlin in 1807 and continued his literary activity.

[37] On the other hand, Fichte acknowledged the difficulty, but argued that his works were clear and transparent to those who made the effort to think without preconceptions and prejudices.

Rather than invite skepticism, Fichte made the radical suggestion that we should throw out the notion of a world-in-itself and accept that consciousness does not have a grounding.

[40][41] The argument for intersubjectivity is central to the conception of selfhood developed in the Foundations of the Science of Knowledge[42] (Grundlage der gesamten [sic] Wissenschaftslehre, 1794/1795).

The Anstoss thus provides the essential impetus that first posits in motion the entire complex train of activities that finally result in our conscious experience both of ourselves and others as empirical individuals and of the world around us.

There are limits to what can be expected from an a priori deduction of experience, and this, for Fichte, equally applies to Kant's transcendental philosophy.

[47] Having been a supporter of Revolutionary France, Fichte became disenchanted by 1804 as Napoleon's armies advanced through Europe, occupying German territories, stripping them of their raw materials and subjugating them to foreign rule.

[48] These lectures, entitled the Addresses to the German Nation, coincided with a period of reform in the Prussian government under the chancellorship of Baron vom Stein.

The aim of the German nation, according to Fichte, was to "found an empire of spirit and reason, and to annihilate completely the crude physical force that rules of the world.

[50] This reading of Fichte was often bolstered through reference to an unpublished letter from 1793, Contributions to the Correction of the Public's Judgment concerning the French Revolution, in which Fichte expressed anti-Semitic sentiments, such as arguing against extending civil rights to Jews and calling them a "state within a state" that could "undermine" the German nation.

Furthermore, the final act of Fichte's academic career was to resign as rector of the University of Berlin in protest when his colleagues refused to punish the harassment of Jewish students.

[52] While recent scholarship has sought to dissociate Fichte's writings on nationalism with their adoption by the Nazi Party, the association continues to blight his legacy,[53] although Fichte, as if to exclude all ground of doubt, clearly and distinctly prohibits,  in his reworked version of The Science of Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge (see § Final period in Berlin) genocide and other crimes against humanity: Fichte's 1800 economic treatise The Closed Commercial State had a profound influence on the economic theories of German Romanticism.

The "exemplary rational state" (Vernunftstaat), Fichte argues, should not allow any of its "subjects" to engage in this or that production, failing to pass the preliminary test, not certifying government agents in their professional skills and agility.

The same demand was imposed on the state, as is evident from Fichte's treatise, by the German "factory" (Fabrike), more precisely, the manufacture of the early 19th century".

[56] Fichte opposed free trade[57] and unrestrained capitalist industrial growth, stating: "There is an endless war of all against all ... And this war is becoming more fierce, unjust, more dangerous in its consequences, the more the world's population grows, the more acquisitions the trading state makes, the more production and art (industry) develops and, together with thus, the number of circulating goods increases, and with them the needs become more and more diversified.

[55] Fichte believed that "active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands.

In The Characteristics of the Present Age (Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters), Fichte outlines his theory of different historical and cultural epochs.