Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/21

 to be too abstract and very terse, he was a splendid orator. He tried in every way to win his audience and to make himself perfectly clear and intelligible to them; his voice was always attuned to the sentiments he expressed, and his delivery never lacked clearness and precision. His discourse swept on like the course of a tempest, rousing rather than moving the souls of his hearers and stirring them to their very depths. His flights of imagination were great and mighty, and the pictures he conjured up for his listeners, though seldom charming, were always bold and massive; his writings, though they contained little that was particularly beautiful, were always characterized by force and weight. Appearance, speech, action—all bore witness to the authority of the man and to the boldness and originality of his spirit.

The most striking features of Fichte’s character were the intensity and resoluteness with which he maintained his moral convictions, and his burning passion for activity. He loved the truth. In 1792, at the very outset of his career, he solemnly declared that he was devoting himself to truth, and throughout his life he maintained that truth was the sole object of his inquiries, and that he troubled himself very little about what was likely to please his hearers or be disagreeable to them. As a thinker, he sought first principles which were indubitably certain; as a man, he loathed lies, hated compliments and flattery, and told everyone the truth to his face. Equally he loved liberty; his whole life was spent in its pursuit and in its defence. His honesty was transparent, his disinterestedness patent, and his kindness proverbial. As early as 1775 he declared that “a theft is a theft and remains a theft.” He treated the students at Jena as honourable men, and understood how to