At the beginning of the nineteenth century Germany was in turmoil. The French Revolution and the Enlightenment that inspired it were still sending shock waves throughout Europe. Germany in particular – the scene of several of Napoleon's battles and the beneficiary of many Napoleonic reforms – was undergoing a profound transformation of its political, religious and cultural life. Poets such as Goethe and Schiller were creating for Germany a great national literature. The religious beliefs to which most Germans were, even in this enlightened age, still deeply attached, were in turn attacked, defended and reinterpreted. History itself was often given a theological significance, seen as the gradual realization of divine providence or at least as an education of the human race that will eventually lead to its perfection. Kant's “critical” philosophy had generated an intense intellectual ferment. It challenged our pretension to know the ultimate nature of reality, even in the distant future, and it cast doubt on traditional religious beliefs. It presented a rational foundation for an individualistic morality that demanded single-minded devotion to duty. It placed aesthetics, the contemplation of beauty, at the centre of philosophy. Younger philosophers, notably Fichte and Hegel's friend Schelling, were inspired by Kant's writings to produce philosophical systems of their own, developing themes in Kant's work. Fichte made morality the central focus of his system, while Schelling turned to art. Both of them rejected Kant's limitation of human knowledge to perceptible phenomena, arguing that we can have knowledge of the “absolute”, of ultimate reality, and of the process by which the absolute generates the perceptible world.