.
The elephant stands upon a tortoise. The question is, upon what does the
tortoise stand? So here, we may say, in the conclusive manner in which
men have always said, that God made the world. Yet sooner or later we
come to the child's question: Who made God? Fichte rightly replied: 'If
God is for us only an object of knowledge, the _Ding-an-sich_ at the end
of the series, there is no escape from the answer that man, the thinker,
in thinking God made him.' All the world, including man, is but the
reflexion, the revelation in forms of the finite, of an unceasing action
of thought of which the ego is the object. Nothing more paradoxical than
this conclusion can be imagined. It seems to make the human subject, the
man myself, the creator of the universe, and the universe only that
which I happen to think it to be.

This interpretation was at first put upon Fichte's reasoning with such
vigour that he was accused of atheism. He was driven from his chair in
Jena. Only after several years was he called to a corresponding post in
Berlin. Later, in his _Vocation of Man_, he brought his thought to
clearness in this form: 'If God be only the object of thought, it
remains true that he is then but the creation of man's thought. God is,
however, to be understood as subject, as the real subject, the
transcendent thinking and knowing subject, indwelling in the world and
making the world what it is, indwelling in us and making us what we are.
We ourselves are subjects only in so far as we are parts of God. We
think and know only in so far as God thinks and knows and acts and lives
in us. The world, including ourselves, is but the reflection of the
thought of God, who thus only has existence. Neither the world nor we
have existence apart from him.'

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born at Rammenau in 1762. His father was a
ribbon weaver. He came of a family distinguished for piety and
uprightness. He studied at Jena, and became an instructor there in 1793.
He was at first a devout disciple of Kant, but gradually separated
himself from his master. There is a humorous tale as to one of his early
books which was, through mistake of the publisher, put forth without the
author's name. For a brief time it was hailed as a work of Kant--his
_Critique of Revelation_. Fichte was a man of high moral enthusiasm,
very uncompromising, unable to put himself in the place of an opponent,
in incessant strife. The great work of his Jena period was his
_Wissen