The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume V.

him to interrupt his studies by accepting private tutorships in families, so that he never succeeded in preparing him self for the examinations. In 1790 he became acquainted with Kant's philosophy, which two students had asked him to expound to them, and to which he now devoted himself with feverish zeal. It revolutionized his entire mode of thought and determined the course of his life. The anonymous publication of his book, _Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation_, in 1792, written from the Kantian point of view and mistaken at first for a work of the great criticist, won him fame and a professorship at Jena (1794). Here, in the intellectual centre of Germany, Fichte became the eloquent exponent of the new idealism, which aimed at the reform of life as well as of _Wissenschaft_; he not only taught philosophy, but preached it, as Kuno Fischer has aptly said. During the Jena period he laid the foundations for his "Science of Knowledge" (_Wissenschaftslehre_) which he presented in numerous works: _T