 By “philosophy of nature,” Fichte seems to have had in mind something similar to Kant’s Metaphysical First Principles of Nature, though Fichte himself devoted very little attention to the execution of such a project. The closest he ever came to developing a philosophy of nature according to transcendental principles is the compressed account of space, time, and matter presented in the Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with Respect to the Theoretical Faculty and the lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo. In neither of these works, however, does he make any effort to distinguish rigorously between the “theoretical” aspect of the foundational portion of his system and a distinctively “theoretical” subdivision of the same (“philosophy of nature”). In fact, a “philosophy of nature in accordance with the principles of the Wissenschaftslehre” turns out to me even more modest than Kant’s and more closely resembles what later came to be called the philosophy of (natural) science than it does the speculative Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel. Indeed, disagreement concerning the compatibility of a rigorously transcendental philosophy with a speculative, a priori “philosophy of nature” was the very issue that precipitated the rift between Fichte and his erstwhile disciple, Schelling. The popular picture of Fichte’s attitude toward nature, namely, that he viewed the latter almost entirely from the perspective of human projects, that is, as the necessary realm for moral striving, is therefore very close to the truth.