 In 1805 Fichte spend a semester as a professor at the University of Erlangen, but returned to Berlin in the fall of that year. The next year, 1806, he published in rapid succession three popular and well-received books, all of which were based upon earlier series of public lectures that he had delivered in Berlin: On the Essence of the Scholar (a reworking of some of the same themes first addressed in the similarly titled lectures of 1794); The Characteristics of the Present Age (an attempt to show the implications of his “system of freedom” for a speculative philosophy of history); and Guide to the Blessed Life, or the Doctrine of Religion (an eloquent and somewhat mystically tinged treatise on the relationship between transcendental philosophy and genuine religion). Taken together, these three “popular” works are remarkable blends of speculative profundity and rhetorical eloquence.