determinateness of the impulse of self-preservation to the clear consciousness of duty and of freedom.  For the moral man there is no resting; each end attained becomes for him the impulse to renewed endeavor, each task fulfilled leads him to a fresh one.  Become self-dependent, act autonomously, make thyself free; let every action have a place in a series, in the continuation of which the ego must become independent.  To this formal and universal norm, again, there is added a special injunction for each individual.  Each individual spirit has its definite mission assigned to it by the world-order:  each ought to do that which it alone should and can do.  Always fulfill thy moral vocation, thy special destination.[1] Or both in popular combination:  Never act contrary to conscience.

[Footnote 1:  Although Fichte was justly charged with surpassing even the abstractness of the Kantian ethics with his bald moral principle, the self-dependence of the ego, he deserves praise for having given ethics a concrete content of indisputable soundness and utility by his introduction of Jacobi’s idea of purified individuality.]

The elevation to freedom is accomplished gradually.  At first freedom consists only in the consciousness of the natural impulse, then follows a breaking away from this by means of maxims, which in the beginning are maxims of individual happiness.  Later on a blind enthusiasm for self-dependence arises and produces an heroic spirit, which would rather be generous than just, which bestows sympathy more readily than respect; true morality, however, does not arise until, with constant attention to the law and continued watchfulness of self, duty is done for its own sake.  No man is for a moment secure of his morality without continued endeavor.  In order to deliverance from the original sin of inertness and its train, cowardice and falsity, men stand in need of examples, such as have been given them in the founders of religions, to construe for them the riddle of freedom.  The necessary enlightenment concerning moral conviction is given by the Church, whose symbols are not to be looked upon as dogmatic propositions, but only as means for the proclamation of the eternal verities, and which, like the state (for both are institutions based on necessity), has for its object to make itself unnecessary as time goes on.

The system of duties distinguishes four classes of duties on the basis of the twofold opposition of universal (non-transferable) and particular (transferable) duties, and of unconditional duties (directed to the whole) and conditional duties (directed toward self).  These four classes are the duties of self-preservation, of class, of non-interference with others, and of vocation.  The lower calling includes the producers, artisans, and tradesmen, whose action terminates directly on nature; and the higher, the scholars, teachers of the people or clergy, artists, and government officials, who work directly on the community of rational beings.  Fichte’s thoughtful and sympathetically written discussion of marriage is in pleasant contrast to the bald, purely legal view of this relation adopted by Kant.