ppears as a ruling power from without, which can be
disobeyed as well as obeyed. We ourselves live in the period of "completed
sinfulness," of absolute license and indifference to all truth, of
unlimited caprice and selfishness. But however far removed from the moral
ideal this age appears, in which the individual, freed from all restraints,
heeds naught except his egoistic desire, and in his care for his own
welfare forgets to labor for the universal, yet this ultimate goal, this
doing from free insight that which in the beginning was done out of blind
faith, cannot be attained unless authority shall have first been shaken off
and the individual become self-dependent. A few signs already betoken
the dawn of the fourth era, that of rational science or of "commencing
justification," in which truth shall be acknowledged supreme, and the
individual ego, at least as cognitive, shall submit itself to the generic
reason. Finally, with the era of rational art, or the state of "completed
justification and sanctification," wherein the will of the individual shall
entirely merge in life for the race, the end of the life of humanity
on earth--the free determination of all its relations according to
reason--will be fulfilled.

In the Jena period the religious life of the ego simply coincided for
Fichte with its practical life; piety coincided with moral conduct; the
Deity with the absolute ego, with the moral law, with the moral order of
the world. A change subsequently took place in his views on this point.
He experienced feelings which, at least in quality, were distinct from
readiness for moral action, no matter how intimately they are intertwined
with this, and no matter how little they can actually be separated from
it; _religion_ is possible neither without a metaphysical belief in a
suprasensible world, nor without obedience to the moral law, yet in itself
it is not that belief nor this action, but the inner spirit which pervades
and animates all our thought and action--it is life, love, blessedness. And
as quiet blessedness is here distinguished from ceaseless action, so for
our thinker the inactive Deity, the self-identical life of the absolute,
separates from the active universal reason, which in its individual organs
advances from task to task. The earlier undivided and unique principle, the
absolute ego, divides into the _Ichheit_ (moral law, world-order), and an
absolute as the ground thereof. "The spirit (the ego, or, a