History is produced through the interaction of the two principles, faith and understanding, which are related to each other as law and freedom, and strives toward a condition in which these two shall be so reconciled that faith shall have entirely passed over into the form of understanding, shall have been transformed into insight, and understanding shall have taken up the content of faith into itself.  History begins with the coming together of two original and primitive races, one of order or faith, and one of freedom or understanding, neither of which would attain to an historical development apart from the other.  From the legal race the free race learns respect for the law, as in turn it arouses in the former the impulse toward freedom.  The course of history divides into five periods.  In the state of “innocence” or of rational instinct that which is rational is done unconsciously, out of natural impulse; in the state of “commencing sin” the instinct for the good changes into an external compulsory authority, the law of reason appears 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