In his 1790 Attempt at a Moral Philosophy, Schmid presents his doctrine of intelligible fatalism. He makes the Kantian claim that consciousness of the moral law entails that reason is capable of determining the will independently of sensibility, a capacity which Schmid calls moral freedom. Moral actions bear the imprint of reason’s self-activity whereas immoral actions are the result of a lack of reason’s activity. Drawing on Ulrich’s claims that there is no middle path between chance and necessity and that chance is irrational, Schmid holds that there must be some ground for reason’s failure to determine the will in the case of immoral action. Accordingly, Schmid posits intelligible obstacles which prevent reason’s efficacy in determining the will. Despite the thoroughgoing necessity of all actions as a result of intelligible forces, Schmid holds that imputation is still possible because the agent is unaware of those forces.

In “On Intelligible Fatalism in the Critical Philosophy” (1794), Johann Christoph Schwab levels several accusations against C.C.E. Schmid’s doctrine of intelligible fatalism. First, whereas the Leibnizian-Wolffian determinist can hope to overcome the forces opposed to freedom insofar as these are natural and alterable, the intelligible fatalist cannot hold any such hope because the intelligible forces opposed to freedom are immutable. Second, insofar as Schmid acknowledges a sensible matter given to the rational being, he seems committed to two kinds of obstacles to reason’s self-activity: sensible and intelligible obstacles. This supposedly makes Schmid’s view inferior to the Leibnizian-Wolffian account, which posits only one sort of obstacle to freedom. Lastly, Schwab claims that intelligible fatalism abolishes the concepts of blame and imputation. Thus, concludes Schwab, the Leibnizian-Wolffian conception of free will is superior to that of intelligible fatalism.