In October 1793, he was married in Zurich, where he remained the rest of the year.

Stirred by the
events and principles of the French Revolution, he wrote and anonymously published two pamphlets
which led to him being seen as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate
of political changes. In December of the same year, he received an invitation to fill the position of
extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Jena. He accepted and began his lectures
in May of the next year. With extraordinary zeal, he expounded his system of "transcendental
idealism". His success was immediate. He seems to have excelled as a lecturer because of the
earnestness and force of his personality. These lectures were later published under the title The
Vocation of the Scholar (Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten). He gave himself
up to intense production, and a succession of works soon appeared. [33][34]

Atheism dispute[edit]
Main article: Atheism dispute
After weathering a couple of academic storms, he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a
result of a charge of atheism. He was accused of this in 1798, after publishing his essay "Ueber den
Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung" ("On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine
World-Governance"), which he had written in response to Friedrich Karl Forberg's essay
"Development of the Concept of Religion", in his Philosophical Journal. For Fichte, God should be
conceived primarily in moral terms: "The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We
require no other God, nor can we grasp any other" ("On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-
Governance"). Fichte's intemperate "Appeal to the Public" ("Appellation an das Publikum", 1799)
provoked F. H. Jacobi to publish an open letter to him, in which he equated philosophy in general
and Fichte's transcendental philosophy in particular with nihilism.[20]