In order to enable me to go to the University, my mother and sister moved to Leipzig and kept house for me during all the time I was there—that is, for two years and a half. In spite of the res angusta domi, I enjoyed my student-life thoroughly, while my home was made very agreeable by my mother and sister. My mother was full of resource, and she was wise enough not to interfere with my freedom. My sister, who was about two years older than myself, was most kind-hearted and devoted both to me and to our mother. There was nothing selfish in her, and we three lived together in perfect love, peace, and harmony. My sister enjoyed what little there was of society, whereas I kept sternly aloof from it. She was much admired, and soon became engaged to a young doctor, Dr. A. Krug, the son of the famous professor of philosophy at Leipzig, whose works, particularly his Dictionary of Philosophy, hold a distinguished place in the history of German philosophy. He was a thorough patriot, and so public spirited that he thought it right to leave a considerable sum of money to the University, without making sufficient provision for his children. However, the young married couple lived happily at Chemnitz, and my sister was proud in the possession of her children. It was the sudden death of several of these children that broke her heart and ruined her health; she died very young. Standing by the grave of her children, she said to me shortly before her death, “Half of me is dead already, and lies buried there; the other half will soon follow.”

Of society, in the ordinary sense of the word, I saw hardly anything. I am afraid I was rather a bear, and declined even to invest in evening dress. I joined a student club which formed part of the Burschenschaft, but which in order to escape prosecution adopted the title of Gemeinschaft. I went there in the evening to drink beer and smoke, and I made some delightful acquaintances and friendships. What fine characters were there, often behind a very rough exterior! My dearest friend was Prowe, of Thorn in East Prussia—so honest, so true, so straightforward, so over-conscientious in the smallest things. He was a classical scholar, and later on entered the Prussian educational service. As a master at the principal school at Thorn his time was fully occupied, and of course he was cut off there from the enlivening influences of literary society. Still he kept up his interest in higher questions, and published some extremely valuable books on Copernicus, a native of Thorn, for which he received the thanks of astronomers and historians, and flattering testimonials from learned societies. We met but seldom later in life, and my own life in England was so busy and full that even our correspondence was not regular. But I met him once more at Ems with a charming wife, and decidedly happy in his own sphere of activity. These early friendships form the distant landscape of life on which we like to dwell when the present ceases to absorb all our thoughts. Our memory dwells on them as a golden horizon, and there remains a constant yearning which makes us feel the incompleteness of this life. After all, the number of our true friends is small; and yet how few even of that small number remain with us for life. There are other faces and other names that rise from beyond the clouds which more and more divide us from our early years.

There were some wild spirits among us who fretted at the narrow-minded policy which went by the name of the Metternich system. Repression was the panacea which Metternich recommended to all the governments of Germany, large and small. No doubt the system of keeping things quiet secured to Germany and to Europe at large a thirty years’ peace, but it could not prevent the accumulation of inflammable material which, after several threatenings, burst forth at last in the conflagration of 1848. Among my friends I remember several who were ready for the wildest schemes in order to have Germany united, respected abroad, and under constitutional government at home. Splendid fellows they were, but they either ended their days within the walls of a prison, or had to throw up everything and migrate to America. What has become of them? Some have risen to the surface in America, others have yielded to the inevitable and become peaceful citizens at home; nay, I am grieved to say, have even accepted service under Government to spy on their former friends and fellow-dreamers. But not a few saw the whole of their life wrecked either in prison or in poverty, though they had done no wrong, and in many cases were the finest characters it has been my good fortune to know. They were before their time, the fruit was not ripe as it was in 1871, but Germany certainly lost some of her best sons in those miserable years; and if my father escaped this political persecution, it was probably due to the influence of the reigning Duke and the Duchess, a Princess of Prussia, who knew that he was not a dangerous man, and not likely to blow up the German Diet.

I myself got a taste of prison life for the offence of wearing the ribbon of a club which the police regarded with disfavour. I cannot say that either the disgrace or the discomfort of my two days’ durance vile weighed much with me, as my friends were allowed free access to me, and came and drank beer and smoked cigars in my cell—of course at my expense—but what I dreaded was the loss of my stipendium or scholarship, which alone enabled me to continue my studies at Leipzig, and which, as a rule, was forfeited for political offences. On my release from prison I went to the Rector of the University and explained to him the circumstances of the case—how I had been arrested simply for membership of a suspected club. I assured him that I was innocent of any political propaganda, and that the loss of my stipendium would entail my leaving the University. Much to my relief, the old gentleman replied: “I have heard nothing about this; and if I do, how am I to know that it refers to you, there are many MÜllers in the University?” Fortunately the distinctive prefix Max had not yet been added to my name.

I must confess that I and my boon companions were sometimes guilty of practices which in more modern days, and certainly at Oxford or Cambridge, would be far more likely to bring the culprits into collision with the authorities than mere membership of societies in which comparatively harmless political talk was indulged in.

Duelling was then, as it is now, a favourite pastime among the students; and though not by nature a brawler, I find that in my student days at Leipzig I fought three duels, of two of which I carry the marks to the present day.

I remember that on one occasion before the introduction of cabs we hired all the sedan-chairs in Leipzig, with their yellow-coated porters, and went in procession through the streets, much to the astonishment of the good citizens, and annoyance also, as they were unable to hire any means of conveyance till a peremptory stop was put to our fun. Not content with this exploit, when the first cabs were introduced into Leipzig, thirty or forty being put on the street at first, I and my friends secured the use of all of them for the day, and proceeded out into the country. The inhabitants who were eagerly looking forward to a drive in one of the new conveyances were naturally annoyed at finding themselves forestalled, and the result was that a stop was put to such freaks in future by the issue of a police regulation that nobody was allowed to hire more than two cabs at a time.

Very innocent amusements, if perhaps foolish, but very happy days all the same; and it must be remembered that we had just emerged from the strict discipline of a German school into the unrestricted liberty of German university life.

It is in every respect a great jump from a German school to a German university. At school a boy even in the highest form, has little choice. All his lessons are laid down for him; he has to learn what he is told, whether he likes it or not. Few only venture on books outside the prescribed curriculum. There is an examination at the end of every half-year, and a boy must pass it well in order to get into a higher form. Boys at a public school (gymnasium), if they cannot pass their examination at the proper time, are advised to go to another school, and to prepare for a career in which classical languages are of less importance.

I must say at once that when I matriculated at Leipzig, in the summer of 1841, I was still very young and very immature. I had determined to study philology, chiefly Greek and Latin, but the fare spread out by the professors was much too tempting. I read Greek and Latin without difficulty; I often read classical authors without ever attempting to translate them; I also wrote and spoke Latin easily. Some of the professors lectured in Latin, and at our academic societies Latin was always spoken. I soon became a member of the classical seminary under Gottfried Hermann, and of the Latin Society under Professor Haupt. Admission to these seminaries and societies was obtained by submitting essays, and it was no doubt a distinction to belong to them. It was also useful, for not only had we to write essays and discuss them with the other members, generally teachers, and with the professor, but we could also get some useful advice from the professor for our private studies. In that respect the German universities do very little for the students, unless one has the good fortune to belong to one of these societies. The young men are let loose, and they can choose whatever lectures they want. I still have my Collegien-Buch, in which every professor has to attest what lectures one has attended. The number of lectures on various subjects which I attended is quite amazing, and I should have attended still more if the honorarium had not frightened me away. Every professor lectured publice and privatim, and for the more important courses, four lectures a week, he charged ten shillings, for more special courses less or nothing. This seems little, but it was often too much for me; and if one added these honoraria to the salary of a popular professor, his income was considerable, and was more than the income of most public servants. I have known professors who had four or five hundred auditors. This gave them £250 twice a year, and that, added to their salary, was considered a good income at that time. All this has been much changed. Salaries have been raised, and likewise the honoraria, so that I well remember the case of Professor von Savigny, who, when he was chosen Minister of Justice at Berlin, declared that he would gladly accept if only his salary was raised to what his income had been as Professor of Law. Of course, professors of Arabic or Sanskrit were badly off, and Privatdocenten (tutors) fared still worse, but the professores ordinarii, particularly if they lectured on an obligatory subject and were likewise examiners, were very well off. In fact, it struck me sometimes as very unworthy of them to keep a famulus, a student who had to tell every one who wished to hear a distinguished professor once or twice, that he would not allow him to come a third time.

One great drawback of the professorial system is certainly the small measure of personal advice that a student may get from the professors. Unless he is known to them personally, or has gained admission to their societies or seminaries, the young student or freshman is quite bewildered by the rich fare in the shape of lectures that is placed before him. Some students, no doubt, particularly in their early terms, solve this difficulty by attending none at all, and there is no force to make them do so, except the examinations looming in the distance. But there are many young men most anxious to learn, only they do not know where to begin. I open my old Collegien-Buch and I find that in the first term or Semester I attended the following lectures, and I may say I attended them regularly, took careful notes, and read such books as were recommended by the professors. I find

This was enough for the summer half-year. Except Greek and Latin, the other subjects were entirely new to me, and what I wanted was to get an idea of what I should like to study. It may be interesting to add the other Semesters as far as I have them in my Collegien-Buch.

Then follows the summer term of 1842.

Winter term, 1842.

Summer term, 1843.

Winter term, 1843-4.

Here my Collegien-Buch breaks off, the fact being that I was preparing to go to Berlin to hear the lectures of Bopp and Schelling.

It will be clear from the above list that I certainly attempted too much. I ought either to have devoted all my time to classical studies exclusively, or carried on my philosophical studies more systematically. I confess that, delighted as I was with Gottfried Hermann and Haupt as my guides and teachers in classics, I found little that could rouse my enthusiasm for Greek and Latin literature, and I always required a dose of that to make me work hard. Everything seemed to me to have been done, and there was no virgin soil left to the plough, no ruins on which to try one’s own spade. Hermann and Haupt gave me work to do, but it was all in the critical line—the genealogical relation of various MSS., or, again, the peculiarities of certain poets, long before I had fully grasped their general character. What Latin vowels could or could not form elision in Horace, Propertius, or Ovid, was a subject that cost me much labour, and yet left very small results as far as I was personally concerned. One clever conjecture, or one indication to show that one MS. was dependent on the other, was rewarded with a Doctissime or Excellentissime, but a paper on Aeschylus and his view of a divine government of the world received but a nodding approval.

They certainly taught their pupils what accuracy meant; they gave us the new idea that MSS. are not everything, unless their real value has been discovered first by finding the place which they occupy in the pedigree of the MSS. of every author. They also taught us that there are mistakes in MSS. which are inevitable, and may safely be left to conjectural emendation; that MSS. of modern date may be and often are more valuable than more ancient MSS., for the simple reason that they were copied from a still more ancient MS., and that often a badly written and hardly legible MS. proves more helpful than others written by a calligraphist, because it is the work of a scholar who copied for himself and not for the market. All these things we learnt and learnt by practical experience under Hermann and Haupt, but what we failed to acquire was a large knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, of the character of each author and of the spirit which pervaded their works. I ought to have read in Latin, Cicero, Tacitus, and Lucretius; in Greek, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle; but as I read only portions of them, my knowledge of the men themselves and their objects in life remained very fragmentary. For instance, my real acquaintance with Plato and Aristotle was confined to a few dialogues of the former and some of the logical works of the latter. The rest I learnt from such works as Ritter and Preller’s Historia Philosophiae Graecae et Romanae ex fontium locis contexta, and from the very useful lectures of Niedner on the history of ancient philosophy. However, I thought I had to do what my professors told me, and shaped my reading so that they should approve of my work.

This must not be understood as in any way disparaging my teachers. Such an idea never entered my head at the time. People have no idea in England what kind of worship is paid by German students to their professors. To find fault with them or to doubt their ipse dixit never entered our minds. What they said of other classical scholars from whom they differed, as Hermann did from Otfried MÜller, or Haupt from Orelli, was gospel, and remained engraved on our memory for a long time. Once when attending Hermann’s lectures, another student who was sitting at the same table with me made disrespectful remarks about old Hermann. I asked him to be quiet, and when he went on with his foolish remarks, I could only stop him by calling him out. As soon as the challenge was accepted he had of course to be quiet, and a few days after we fought our duel without much damage to either of us. I only mention this because it shows what respect and admiration we felt for our professor, also because it exemplifies the usefulness of duelling in a German university, where after a challenge not another word can be said or violence be threatened even by the rudest undergraduate. A duel for a Greek conjecture may seem very absurd, but in duels of this kind all that is wanted is really a certain knowledge of fencing, care being taken that nothing serious shall happen. And yet, though that is so, the feeling of a possible danger is there, and keeps up a certain etiquette and a certain proper behaviour among men taken from all strata of society. Nor can I quite deny that when I went in the morning to a beautiful wood in the neighbourhood of Leipzig, certain misgivings were difficult to suppress. I saw myself severely wounded, possibly killed, by my antagonist, and carried to a house where my mother and sister were looking for me. This went off when I met the large assembly of students, beautifully attired in their club uniforms, the beer barrels pushed up on one side, the surgeon and his instruments waiting on the other. There were ever so many, thirty or forty couples I think, waiting to fight their duels that morning. Some fenced extremely well, and it was a pleasure to look on; and when one’s own turn came, all one thought of was how to stand one’s ground boldly, and how to fence well. Some of the combatants came on horseback or in carriages, and there was a small river close by to enable us to escape if the police should have heard of our meeting. For popular as these duels are, they are forbidden and punished, and the severest punishment seemed always to be the loss of our uniforms, our arms, our flags, and our barrels of beer. However, we escaped all interference this time, and enjoyed our breakfast in the forest thoroughly, nothing happening to disturb the hilarity of the morning.

Not being satisfied with what seemed to me a mere chewing of the cud in Greek and Latin, I betook myself to systematic philosophy, and even during the first terms read more of that than of Plato and Aristotle. I belonged to the philosophical societies of Weisse, of Drobisch, and of Lotze, a membership in each of which societies entailed a considerable amount of reading and writing.

At Leipzig, Professor Drobisch represented the school of Herbart, which prided itself on its clearness and logical accuracy, but was naturally less attractive to the young spirits at the University who had heard of Hegel’s Idea and looked to the dialectic process as the solution of all difficulties. I wished to know what it all meant, for I was not satisfied with mere words. There is hardly a word that has so many meanings as Idea, and I doubt whether any of the raw recruits, just escaped from school, and unacquainted with the history of philosophy, could have had any idea of what Hegel’s Idea was meant for. Yet they talked about it very eloquently and very positively over their glasses of beer; and anybody who came from Berlin and could speak mysteriously or rapturously about the Idea and its evolution by the dialectic process, was listened to with silent wonder by the young Saxons, who had been brought up on Kant and Krug. The Hegelian fever was still very high at that time. It is true Hegel himself was dead (1831), and though he was supposed to have declared on his deathbed that he left only one true disciple, and that that disciple had misunderstood him, to be a Hegelian was considered a sine qua non, not only among philosophers, but quite as much among theologians, men of science, lawyers, artists, in fact, in every branch of human knowledge, at least in Prussia. If Christianity in its Protestant form was the state-religion of the kingdom, Hegelianism was its state-philosophy. Beginning with the Minister of Instruction down to the village schoolmaster, everybody claimed to be a Hegelian, and this was supposed to be the best road to advancement. Though Altenstein, who was then at the head of the Ministry of Instruction, began to waver in his allegiance to Hegel, even he could not resist the rush of public and of official opinion. It was he who, when a new professor of philosophy was recommended to him either by Hegel himself or by some of his followers, is reported to have said: “Gentlemen, I have read some of the young man’s books, and I cannot understand a word of them. However, you are the best judges, only allow me to say that you remind me a little of the French officer who told his tailor to make his breeches as tight as possible, and dismissed him with the words: ‘Enfin, si je peux y entrer, je ne les prendrai pas.’ This seems to me very much what you say of your young philosopher. If I can understand his books, I am not to take him.” This Hegelian fever was very much like what we have passed through ourselves at the time of the Darwinian fever; Darwin’s natural evolution was looked upon very much like Hegel’s dialectic process, as the general solvent of all difficulties. The most egregious nonsense was passed under that name, as it was under the name of evolution. Hegel knew very well what he meant, so did Darwin. But the empty enthusiasm of his followers became so wild that Darwin himself, the most humble of all men, became quite ashamed of it. The master, of course, was not responsible for the folly of his so-called disciples, but the result was inevitable. After the bow had been stretched to the utmost, a reaction followed, and in the case of Hegelianism, a complete collapse. Even at Berlin the popularity of Hegelianism came suddenly to an end, and after a time no truly scientific man liked to be called a Hegelian. These sudden collapses in Germany are very instructive. As long as a German professor is at the head of affairs and can do something for his pupils, his pupils are very loud in their encomiums, both in public and in private. They not only exalt him, but help to belittle all who differ from him. So it was with Hegel, so it was at a later time with Bopp, and Curtius, and other professors, particularly if they had the ear of the Minister of Education. But soon after the death of these men, particularly if another influential star was rising, the change of tone was most sudden and most surprising; even the sale of their books dwindled down, and they were referred to only as landmarks, showing the rapid advance made by living celebrities. Perhaps all this cannot be helped, as long as human nature is what it is, but it is nevertheless painful to observe.

I had the good fortune of becoming acquainted with Hegelianism through Professor Christian Weisse at Leipzig, who, though he was considered a Hegelian, was a very sober Hegelian, a critic quite as much as an admirer of Hegel. He had a very small audience, because his manner of lecturing was certainly most trying and tantalizing. But by being brought into personal contact with him one was able to get help from him wherever he could give it. Though Weisse was convinced of the truth of Hegel’s Dialectic Method, he often differed from him in its application. This Dialectic Method consisted in showing how thought is constantly and irresistibly driven from an affirmative to a negative position, then reconciles the two opposites, and from that point starts afresh, repeating once more the same process. Pure being, for instance, from which Hegel’s ideal evolution starts, was shown to be the same as empty being, that is to say, nothing, and both were presented as identical, and in their identity giving us the new concept of Becoming (Werden), which is being and not-being at the same time. All this may appear to the lay reader rather obscure, but could not well be passed over.

So far Weisse followed the great thinker, and I possess still, in his own writing, the picture of a ladder on which the intellect is represented as climbing higher and higher from the lowest concept to the highest—a kind of Jacob’s ladder on which the categories, like angels of God, ascend and descend from heaven to earth. We must remember that the true Hegelian regarded the Ideas as the thoughts of God. Hegel looked upon this evolution of thought as at the same time the evolution of Being, the Idea being the only thing that could be said to be truly real. In order to understand this, we must remember that the historical key to Hegel’s Idea was really the Neo-Platonic or Alexandrian Logos. But of this Logos we ignorant undergraduates, sitting at the feet of Prof. Weisse, knew absolutely nothing, and even if the Idea was sometimes placed before us as the Absolute, the Infinite, or the Divine, it was to us, at least to most of us, myself included, vox et praeterea nihil. We watched the wonderful evolutions and convolutions of the Idea in its Dialectic development, but of the Idea itself or himself we had no idea whatever. It was all darkness, a vast abyss, and we sat patiently and wrote down what we could catch and comprehend of the Professor’s explanations, but the Idea itself we never could lay hold of. It would not have been so difficult if the Professor had spoken out more boldly. But whenever he came to the relation of the Idea to what we mean by God, there was always even with him, who was a very honest man, a certain theological hesitation. Hegel himself seems to shrink occasionally from the consequence that the Idea really stands in the place of God, and that it is in the self-conscious spirit of humanity that the ideal God becomes first conscious of himself. Still, that is the last word of Hegel’s philosophy, though others maintain that the Idea with Hegel was the thought of God, and that human thought was but a repetition of that divine thought. With Hegel there is first the evolution of the Idea in the pure ether of logic from the simplest to the highest category. Then follows Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, that is, the evolution of the Idea in nature, the Idea having by the usual dialectic process negatived itself and entered into its opposite (Anderssein), passing through a new process of space and time, and ending in the self-conscious human soul. Thus nature and spirit were represented as dominated by the Idea in its logical development. Nature was one manifestation of the Idea, History the other, and it became the task of the philosopher to discover its traces both in the progress of nature and in the historical progress of thought.

And here it was where the strongest protests began to be heard. Physical Science revolted, and Historical Research soon joined the rebellion. Professor Weisse also, in spite of his great admiration for Hegel, protested in his Lectures against this idealization of history, and showed how often Hegel, if he could not find the traces he was looking for in the historical development of the Idea, was misled by his imperfect knowledge of facts, and discovered what was not there, but what he felt convinced ought to have been there. Nowhere has this become so evident as in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. The conception was grand of seeing in the historical development of religion a repetition of the Dialectic Progress of the Idea. But facts are stubborn things, and do not yield even to the supreme command of the Idea. Besides, if the historical facts of religion were really such as the Dialectic Process of the Idea required, these facts are no longer what they were before 1831, and what would become then of the Idea which, as he wrote in his preface to his Metaphysics, could not possibly be changed to please the new facts? It was this part of Weisse’s lectures, it was the protest of the historical conscience against the demands of the Idea, that interested me most. I see as clearly the formal truth as the material untruth of Hegel’s philosophy. The thorough excellence of its method and the desperate baldness of its results, strike me with equal force. Though I did not yet know what kind of thing or person the Idea was really meant for, I knew myself enough of ancient Greek philosophy and of Oriental religions to venture to criticize Hegel’s representation and disposition of the facts themselves. I could not accept the answer of my more determined Hegelian friends, Tant pis pour les faits, but felt more and more the old antagonism between what ought to be and what is, between the reasonableness of the Idea, and the unreasonableness of facts. I found a strong supporter in a young Privat-Docent who at that time began his brilliant career at Leipzig, Dr. Lotze. He had made a special study of mathematics and physical science, and felt the same disagreement between facts and theories in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature which had struck me so much in reading his Philosophy of Religion. I joined his philosophical society, and I lately found among my old papers several essays which I had written for our meetings. They amused me very much, but I should be sorry to see them published now. It is curious that after many years I, as a Delegate of the University Press at Oxford, was instrumental in getting the first English translation of Lotze’s Metaphysics published in England; and it is still more curious that Mark Pattison, the late Rector of Lincoln, should have opposed it with might and main as a useless book which would never pay its expenses. I stood up for my old teacher, and I am glad to say to the honour of English philosophers, that the translation passed through several editions, and helped not a little to establish Lotze’s position in England and America. He died in 1881.

It is extraordinary how the young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through which they have to pass in their academic career. I confess I myself felt quite bewildered for a time, and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers. Why should I not be able to understand, I asked myself, what other people seemed to understand without any effort? We speak the same language, why should we not be able to think the same thought? I took refuge for a time in history—the history of language, of religion, and of philosophy. There was a very learned professor at Leipzig, Dr. Niedner, who lectured on the History of Greek Philosophy, and whose Manual for the History of Philosophy has been of use to me through the whole of my life. Socrates said of Heraclitus: “What I have understood of his book is excellent, and I suppose therefore that even what I have not understood is so too; but one must be a Delian swimmer not to be drowned in it.” I tried for a long time to follow this advice with regard to Hegel and Weisse, and though disheartened did not despair. I understood some of it, why should not the rest follow in time? Thus, I never gave up the study of philosophy at Leipzig and afterwards at Berlin, and my first contributions to philosophical journals date from that early time, when I was a student in the University of Leipzig. My very earliest, though very unsuccessful, struggles to find an entrance into the mysteries of philosophy date even from my school-days.

I remember some years before, when I was quite young, perhaps no more than fifteen years of age, listening with bated breath to some professors at Leipzig who were talking very excitedly about philosophy in my presence. I had no idea what was meant by philosophy, still less could I follow when they began to discuss Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft. One of my friends, whom I looked up to as a great authority, confessed that he had read the book again and again, but could not understand the whole of it. My curiosity was much excited, and once, while he was taking a walk with me, I asked him very timidly what Kant’s book was about, and how a man could write a book that other men could not understand. He tried to explain what Kant’s book was about, but it was all perfect darkness before my eyes; I was trying to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before my mind like mist, without a single ray of light, without any way out of all that maze of words. But when at last he said he would lend me the book, I fell on it and pored over it hour after hour. The result was the same. My little brain could not take in the simplest ideas of the first chapters—that space and time were nothing by themselves; that we ourselves gave the form of space and time to what was given us by the senses. But though defeated I would not give in; I tried again and again, but of course it was all in vain. The words were here and I could construe them, but there was nothing in my mind which the words could have laid hold on. It was like rain on hard soil, it all ran off, or remained standing in puddles and muddles on my poor brain.

At last I gave it up in despair, but I had fully made up my mind that as soon as I went to the University I would find out what philosophy really was, and what Kant meant by saying that space and time were forms of our sensuous intuition. I see that, accordingly, in the summer of 1841, I attended lectures on Aesthetics by Professor Weisse, on Anthropology by Lotze, and on Psychology by Professor Heinroth, and I slowly learnt to distinguish between what was going on within me, and what I had been led to imagine existed outside me, or at least quite independent of me. But before I had got a firm grasp of Kant, of his forms of intuition, and the categories of the understanding, I was thrown into Hegelianism. This, too, was at first entire darkness, but I was not disheartened. I attended Professor Weisse’s lectures on Hegel in the winter of 1841-2, and again in the winter of 1842-3 I attended his lectures on Logic and Metaphysics, and on the Philosophy of History. He took an interest in me, and I felt most strongly attracted by him. Soon after I joined his Philosophical Society, and likewise that of Professor Drobisch. In these societies every member, when his turn came, had to write an essay and defend it against the professor and the other members of the society. All this was very helpful, but it was not till I had heard a course of lectures on the History of Philosophy, by Professor Niedner, that my interest in Philosophy became strong and healthy. While Weisse was a leading Hegelian philosopher, and Drobisch represented the opposite philosophy of Herbart, Niedner was purely historical, and this appealed most to my taste. Still, my philosophical studies remained very disjointed. At last I was admitted to Lotze’s Philosophical Society also, and here we chiefly read and discussed Kant’s Kritik. Lotze was then quite a young man, undecided as yet himself between physical science and pure philosophy.

Weisse was certainly the most stirring lecturer, but his delivery was fearful. He did not read his lectures, as many professors did, but would deliver them extempore. He had no command of language, and there was a pause after almost every sentence. He was really thinking out the problem while he was lecturing; he was constantly repeating his sentences, and any new thought that crossed his mind would carry him miles away from his subject. It happened sometimes in these rhapsodies that he contradicted himself, but when I walked home with him after his lecture to a village near Leipzig where he lived, he would readily explain how it happened, how he meant something quite different from what he had said, or what I had understood. In fact he would give the whole lecture over again, only much more freely and more intelligibly. I was fully convinced at that time that Hegel’s philosophy was the final solution of all problems; I only hesitated about his philosophy of history as applied to the history of religion. I could not bring myself to admit that the history of religion, nor even the history of philosophy as we know it from Thales to Kant, was really running side by side with his Logic, showing how the leading concepts of the human mind, as elaborated in the Logic, had found successive expression in the history and development of the schools of philosophy as known to us. Weisse was strong both in his analysis of concepts and in his knowledge of history, and though he taught Hegel as a faithful interpreter, he always warned us against trusting too much in the parallelism between Logic and History. Study the writings of the good philosophers, he would say, and then see whether they will or will not fit into the Procrustean bed of Hegel’s Logic. And this was the best lesson he could have given to young men. How well founded and necessary the warning was I found out myself, the more I studied the religion and philosophies of the East, and then compared what I saw in the original documents with the account given by Hegel in his Philosophy of Religion. It is quite true that Hegel at the time when he wrote, could not have gained a direct or accurate knowledge of the principal religions of the East. But what I could not help seeing was that what Hegel represented as the necessity in the growth of religious thought, was far away from the real growth, as I had watched it in some of the sacred books of these religions. This shook my belief in the correctness of Hegel’s fundamental principles more than anything else.

At that time Herbart’s philosophy, as taught by Drobisch at Leipzig, came to me as a most useful antidote. The chief object of that philosophy is, as is well known, the analysing and clearing, so to speak, of our concepts. This was exactly what I wanted, only that occupied as I was with the problems of language, I at once translated the object of his philosophy into a definition of words. Henceforth the object of my own philosophical occupations was the accurate definition of every word. All words, such as reason, pure reason, mind, thought, were carefully taken to pieces and traced back, if possible, to their first birth, and then through their further developments. My interest in this analytical process soon took an historical, that is etymological, character in so far as I tried to find out why any words should now mean exactly what, according to our definition, they ought to mean. For instance, in examining such words as Vernunft or Verstand, a little historical retrospect showed that their distinction as reason and understanding was quite modern, and chiefly due to a scientific definition given and maintained by the Kantian school of philosophy. Of course every generation has a right to define its philosophical terms, but from an historical point of view Kant might have used with equal right Vernunft for Verstand, and Verstand for Vernunft. Etymologically or historically both words have much the same meaning. Vernunft, from Vernehmen, meant originally no more than perception, while Verstand meant likewise perception, but soon came to imply a kind of understanding, even a kind of technical knowledge, though from a purely etymological standpoint it had nothing that fitted it more for carrying the meaning, which is now assigned to it in German in distinction to Vernunft, than understanding had as distinguished from reason. It requires, of course, a very minute historical research to trace the steps by which such words as reason and understanding diverge in different directions, in the language of the people and in philosophical parlance. This teaches us a very important distinction, namely that between the popular development of the meaning of a word, and its meaning as defined and asserted by a philosopher or by a poet in the plenitude of his power. Etymological definition is very useful for the first stages in the history of a word. It is useful to know, for instance, that deus, God, meant originally bright, bright whether applied to sky, sun, moon, stars, dawn, morning, dayspring, spring of the year, and many other bright objects in nature, that it thus assumed a meaning common to them all, splendid, or heavenly, beneficent, powerful, so that when in the Veda already we find a number of heavenly bodies, or of terrestrial bodies, or even of periods of time called Devas, this word has assumed a more general, more comprehensive, and more exalted meaning. It did not yet mean what the Greeks called ?e?? or gods, but it meant something common to all these ?e??, and thus could naturally rise to express what the Greeks wanted to express by that word. There was as yet no necessity for defining deva or ?e??, when applied to what was meant by gods, but of course the most opposite meanings had clustered round it. While a philosophical Greek would maintain that ?e?? meant what was one and never many, a poetical Greek or an ordinary Greek would hold that it meant what was by nature many. But while in such a case philosophical analysis and historical genealogy would support each other, there are ever so many cases where etymological analysis is as hopeless as logical analysis. Who is to define romantic, in such expressions as romantic literature. Etymologically we know that romantic goes back finally to Rome, but the mass of incongruous meanings that have been thrown at random into the caldron of that word, is so great that no definition could be contrived to comprehend them all. And how should we define Gothic or Romanic architecture, remembering that as no Goths had anything to do with pointed arches, neither were any Romans responsible for the flat roofs of the German churches of the Saxon emperors.

Enough to show what I meant when I said that Professor Drobisch, in his Lectures on Herbart, gave one great encouragement in the special work in which I was already engaged as a mere student, the Science of Language and Etymology. If Herbart declared philosophy to consist in a thorough examination (Bearbeitung) of concepts, or conceptual knowledge, my answer was, Only let it be historical, nay, in the beginning, etymological; I was not so foolish as to imagine that a word as used at present, meant what it meant etymologically. Deus no longer meant brilliant, but it should be the object of the true historian of language to prove how Deus, having meant originally brilliant, came to mean what it means now.

For a time I thought of becoming a philosopher, and that sounded so grand that the idea of preparing for a mere schoolmaster, teaching Greek and Latin, seemed to me more and more too narrow a sphere. Soon, however, while dreaming of a chair of philosophy at a German University, I began to feel that I must know something special, something that no other philosopher knew, and that induced me to learn Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. I had only heard what we call in German the chiming, not the striking of the bells of Indian philosophy; I had read Frederick Schlegel’s explanatory book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), and looked into Windischmann’s Die Philosophie im Fortgange der Weltgeschichte (1827-1834). These books are hardly opened now—they are antiquated, and more than antiquated; they are full of mistakes as to facts, and mistakes as to the conclusions drawn from them. But they had ushered new ideas into the world of thought, and they left on many, as they did on me, that feeling which the digger who prospects for minerals is said to have, that there must be gold beneath the surface, if people would only dig. That feeling was very vague as yet, and might have been entirely deceptive, nor did I see my way to go beyond the point reached by these two dreamers or explorers. The thought remained in the rubbish-chamber of my mind, and though forgotten at the time, broke forth again when there was an opportunity. It was a fortunate coincidence that at that very time, in the winter of 1841, a new professorship was founded at Leipzig and given to Professor Brockhaus. Uncertain as I was about the course I had to follow in my studies, I determined to see what there was to be learnt in Sanskrit. There was a charm in the unknown, and, I must confess, a charm also in studying something which my friends and fellow students did not know. I called on Professor Brockhaus, and found that there were only two other students to attend his lectures, one Spiegel, who already knew the elements of Sanskrit, and who is still alive in Erlangen,[9] as a famous professor of Sanskrit and Zend, though no longer lecturing, and another, Klengel; both several years my seniors, but both extremely amiable to their younger fellow student. Klengel was a scholar, a philosopher, and a musician, and though after a term or two he had to give up his study of Sanskrit, he was very useful to me by his good advice. He encouraged me and praised me for my progress in Sanskrit, which was no doubt more rapid than his own, and he confirmed me in my conviction that something might be made of Sanskrit by the philologist and by the philosopher. It should not be forgotten that at that time there was a strong prejudice against Sanskrit among classical scholars. The number of men who stood up for it, though it included names such as W. von Humboldt, F. and A.W. von Schlegel, was still very small. Even Herder’s and Goethe’s prophetic words produced little effect. It is said that when the Government had been persuaded, chiefly by the two Humboldts, to found a chair of Sanskrit at the University of WÜrzburg, and had nominated Bopp as its first occupant, the philological faculty of the University protested against such a desecration, and the appointment fell through. It is true, no doubt, that in their first enthusiasm the students of Sanskrit had uttered many exaggerated opinions. Sanskrit was represented as the mother of all languages, instead of being the elder sister of the Aryan family. The beginning of all language, of all thought, of all religion was traced back to India, and when Greek scholars were told that Zeus existed in the Veda under the name of Dyaus, there was a great flutter in the dovecots of classical scholarship. Many of these enthusiastic utterances had afterwards to be toned down. How we did enjoy those enthusiastic days, which even in their exaggerated hopes were not without some use. Problems such as the beginning of language, of thought, of mythology and religion, were started with youthful hope that the Veda would solve them all, as if the Vedic Rishis had been present at the first outburst of roots, of concepts, nay, that like Pelops and other descendants of Zeus, those Vedic poets had enjoyed daily intercourse with the gods, and had been present at the mutilation of Ouranos, or at the over-eating of Kronos. We may be ashamed to-day of some of the dreams of the early spring of man’s sojourn on earth, but they were enchanting dreams, and all our thoughts of man’s nature and destiny on earth were tinged with the colours of a morning that threw light over the grey darkness which preceded it. It was delightful to see that Dyaus meant originally the bright sky, something actually seen, but something that had to become something unseen. All knowledge, whether individual or possessed by mankind at large, must have begun with what the senses can perceive, before it could rise to signify something unperceived by the senses. Only after the blue aether had been perceived and named, was it possible to conceive and speak of the sky as active, as an agent, as a god. Dyaus or Zeus might thus be called the most sublime, he who resides in the aether, a????? ?a??? ????????, the heavenly one, or ???????? ?pat?? and ???st??, the highest, and at last Iupiter Optimus Maximus, a name applied even to the true God. When Zeus had once become like the sky, all seeing or omniscient (?p?????), would he not naturally be supposed to see, not only the good, but the evil deeds of men also, nay, their very thoughts, whether pure or criminal? And if so, would he not be the avenger of evil, the watcher of oaths (??????), the protector of the helpless (???s???)? Yet, if conceived, as for a long time all the gods were conceived and could only be conceived, namely, as human in their shape, should we not necessarily get that strange amalgamation of a human being doing superhuman work—hurling the thunderbolt, shouting in thunder, hidden by dark clouds, and smiling in the serene blue of the sky with its brilliant scintillations? All this and much more became perfectly intelligible, the step from the visible to the invisible, from the perceived to the conceived, from nature to nature’s gods, and from nature’s god to a more sublime unseen and spiritual power. All this seemed to pass before our very eyes in the Veda, and then to be reflected in Homer and Pindar.

Some details of this restored picture of the world of gods and men in early times, nay, in the very spring of time, may have to be altered, but the picture, the eidyllion remained, and nothing could curb the adventurous spirit and keep it from pushing forward and trying to do what seemed to others almost impossible, namely, to watch the growth of the human mind as reflected in the petrifactions of language. Language itself spoke to us with a different voice, and a formerly unsuspected meaning.

We knew, for instance, that ewig meant eternal, but whence eternal. Nothing eternal was ever seen, and it seemed to the philosopher that eternal could be expressed by a negation only, by a negation of what was temporary. But we now learnt that ewig was derived in word and therefore in thought from the Gothic aiwar, time. Ewigkeit was therefore originally time, and “for all time” came naturally to mean “for all eternity.” Eternity also came from aeternus, that is aeviternus, for time, i.e. for all time, and thus for eternity, while aevum meant life, lifetime, age. But now came the question, if aevum shows the growth of this word, and its origin, and how it arrives in the end at the very opposite pole, life and time coming to mean eternity, could we not by the same process discover the origin and growth of such short Greek words as ?e? and a?e?? It seems almost impossible, yet remembering that aevum meant originally life, we find in Vedic Sanskrit eva, course, way, life, the same as aevum, while the Sanskrit Âyush, likewise derived from i, to go, forms its locative Âyushi. Âyushi, or originally Âyasi, would mean “in life, in time,” and turned into Greek would regularly become then a?e?, lifelong, or ever. It was not difficult to find fault with this and other etymologies, and to ask for an explanation of a??? and a???, as derived from the same word Âyus. It is curious that people will not see that etymologies, and particularly the gradual development in the form and meaning of words, can hardly ever be a matter of mathematical certainty.

Historical, nay, even individual, influences come in which prevent the science of language from becoming purely mechanical. Pott, and Curtius, and others stood up against Bopp and Grimm, maintaining that there could be nothing irregular in language, particularly in phonetic changes. If this means no more than that under the same circumstances the same changes will always take place, it would be of course a mere truism. The question is only whether we can ever know all the circumstances, and whether there are not some of these circumstances which cause what we are apt to call irregularities. When Bopp said that Sanskrit d corresponds to a Greek d, but often also to a Greek ?, I doubt whether this is often the case. All I say is, if deva corresponds to ?e??, we must try to find the reason or the circumstances which caused so unusual a correspondence. If no more is meant than that there must be a reason for all that seems irregular, no one would gainsay that, neither Bopp nor Grimm, and no one ever doubted that as a principle. But to establish these reasons is the very difficulty with which the Science of Language has to deal.

There is no word that has not an etymology, only if we consider the distance of time that separates us from the historical facts we are trying to account for, we should sometimes be satisfied with probabilities and not always stipulate for absolute certainty. Many of Bopp’s, Grimm’s, and Pott’s etymologies have had to be surrendered, and yet our suzerainty over that distant country which they conquered, over the Aryan home, remains. If there is an etymology containing something irregular, and for which no reason has as yet been found, we must wait till some better etymology can be suggested, or a reason be found for that apparent irregularity. If the etymological meaning of duhitar, daughter, as milkmaid, is doubted, let us have a better explanation, not a worse; but the general picture of the early family among the Aryans “somewhere in Asia” is not thereby destroyed. The father, Sk. pitar, remains the protector or nourisher, though the i for a in pater and pat?? is irregular. The mother, mÂtar, remains the bearer of children, though m is no longer used in that sense in any of the Aryan languages. Pati is the lord, the strong one—therefore the husband; vadhÛ, the yoke-fellow, or the wife as brought home, possibly as carried off by force. Vis or vesa is the home, ????? or vicus, what was entered for shelter. Svasura, ??????, Socer, the father-in-law, is the old man of the svas, the famuli, or the family, or the clients, though the first s is irregular, and can be defended only on the ground of mistaken analogy. BhrÂtar, frater, brother, was the supporter; svastar, soror, sister, the comforter, &c.

What do a few objections signify? The whole picture remains, as if we could look into the vesa, the ????? the veih, the home, the village of the ancient Aryans, and watch them, the svas, the people, in their mutual relations. Even compound words, such as vis-pati, lord of a family or a village, have been preserved to the present day in the Lithuanian Veszpats, lord, whether King or God. It is enough for us to see that the relationship between husband and wife, between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, nay, even between children-in-law and parents-in-law, had been recognized and sanctified by names. That there are, and always will be, doubts and slight differences of opinion on these prehistoric thoughts and words, is easily understood. We were pleased for a long time to see in vidua, widow, the Sanskrit vidua, i.e. without a man or a husband. We now derive vi-dhavÂ, widow, from vidh, to be separated, to be without (cf. vido in divido, and Sk. vidh), but the picture of the Aryan family remains much the same.

When these and similar antiquities were for the first time brought to light by Bopp, Grimm, and Pott, what wonder that we young men should have jumped at them, and shouted with delight, more even than the diggers who dug up Babylonian palaces or Egyptian temples! No one did more for these antiquarian finds and restorations than A. Kuhn, a simple schoolmaster, but afterwards a most distinguished member of the Berlin Academy. How often did I sit with him in his study as he worked, surrounded by his Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit books. In later times also, when I had made some discoveries myself as to the mythological names or beings identical in Vedic and Greek writings, how pleasant was it to see him rub his hands or shake his head. Long before I had published my identifications they were submitted to him, and he communicated to me his own guesses as I communicated mine to him. Kuhn would never appropriate what belonged to anybody else, and even in cases where we agreed, he would always make it clear that we had both arrived independently at the same result.

It is in the nature of things that every new generation of scholars should perfect their tools, and with these discover flaws in the work left by their predecessors. Still, what is the refined chiselling of later scholars compared with the rough-hewn stones of men like Bopp or Grimm? If the Cyclopean stones of the Pelasgians are not like the finished works of art by Phidias, what would the Parthenon be without the walls ascribed to the Cyclops? It is the same in all sciences, and we must try to be just, both to the genius of those who created, and to the diligence of those who polished and refined.

For all this, however, I met with but small sympathy and encouragement at Leipzig; nay, I had to be very careful in uttering what were supposed to be heretical or unscholarlike opinions in the seminary of Gottfried Hermann, or in the Latin society of Haupt. The latter particularly, though he knew very well how much light had been spread on the growth of language by the researches of Bopp, Grimm, and Pott, and though Grimm was his intimate friend of whom he always spoke with real veneration, could not bear his own pupils dabbling in this subject. And of course at that time my knowledge of comparative philology was a mere dabbling. If he could discover a false quantity in any etymology, great was his delight, and his sarcasm truly withering, particularly as it was poured out in very classical Latin. Gottfried Hermann was a different character. He saw there was a new light and he would not turn his back to it. He knew how lightly his antagonist, Otfried MÜller, valued Sanskrit in his mythological essays, and he set to work, and in one of his last academical programs actually gave the paradigms of Sanskrit verbs as compared with those of Greek. He saw that the coincidences between the two could not be casual, and if they were so overwhelming in the mere termination of verbs, what might we not expect in words and names, even in mythological names? He by no means discouraged me, nay, he was sorry to lose me, when in my third year I went to Berlin. He showed me great kindness on several occasions, and when the time came to take my degree of M.A. and Ph.D., he, as Dean of the Faculty, invited me to return to Leipzig, offering me an exhibition to cover the expenses of the Degree.

Max MÜller, Aged 20

F. MAX MÜLLER
Aged Twenty

My wish to go to Berlin arose partly from a desire to hear Bopp, but yet more from a desire to make the acquaintance of Schelling. My inclination towards philosophy had become stronger and stronger; I had my own ideas about the mythological as a necessary form of ancient philosophy, and when I saw that the old philosopher had advertised his lectures or lecture on mythology, I could not resist, and went to Berlin in 1844. I must say at once that Professor Bopp, though he was extremely kind to me, was at that time, if not old—he was only fifty-three—very infirm. In his lectures he simply read his Comparative Grammar with a magnifying glass, and added very little that was new. He lent me some manuscripts which he had copied in Latin in his younger days, but I could not get much help from him when I came to really difficult passages. This, I confess, puzzled me at the time, for I looked on every professor as omniscient. The time comes, however, when we learn that even at fifty-three a man may have forgotten certain things, nay, may have let many books and new discoveries even in his own subject pass by, because he has plenty to do with his own particular studies. We remember the old story of the professor who, when charged by a young and rather impertinent student with not knowing this or that, replied: “Sir, I have forgotten more than you ever knew.” And so it is indeed. Human nature and human memory are very strong during youth and manhood, but even at fifty there is with many people a certain decline of mental vigour that tells chiefly on the memory. Things are not exactly forgotten, but they do not turn up at the right time. They just leave a certain knowledge of where the missing information can be found; they leave also a kind of feeling that the ground is not quite safe and that we must no longer trust entirely to our memory. In one respect this feeling is very useful, for instead of writing down anything, trusting to our memory as we used to do, we feel it necessary to verify many things which formerly were perfectly clear and certain in our memory without such reference to books.

I remember being struck with the same thing in the case of Professor Wilson, the well-known Oxford Professor of Sanskrit. He was kind enough to read with me, and I certainly was often puzzled, not only by what he knew, but also by what he had forgotten. I feel now that I misjudged him, and that his open declaration, “I don’t know, let us look it up,” really did him great honour. I still have in my possession a portion of PÂnini’s Vedic grammar translated by him. I put by the side of it my own translation, and he openly acknowledged that mine, with the passages taken from the Veda, was right. There was no humbug about Wilson. He never posed as a scholar; nay, I remember his saying to me more than once, “You see, I am not a scholar, I am a gentleman who likes Sanskrit, and that is all.” He certainly did like Sanskrit, and he knew it better than many a professor, but in his own way. He had enjoyed the assistance of really learned Pandits, and he never forgot to record their services. But he had himself cleared the ground—he had really done original work. In fact, he had done nothing but original work, and then he was abused for not having always found at the first trial what others discovered when standing on his shoulders. Again, he was found fault with for not having had a classical education. His education was, I believe, medical, but when once in the Indian Civil Service, he made himself useful in many ways, educational and otherwise. When he left India he was Master of the Mint. Such a man might not know Greek and Latin like F.A. von Schlegel, or any other professor, but he knew his own subject, and it is simply absurd if classical scholars imagine that anybody can carry on his Greek and Latin and at the same time make himself a perfect scholar in Sanskrit. Such a feeling is natural among small schoolmasters, but it is dying out at last among real scholars. I have known very good Sanskrit scholars who knew no Greek at all, and very little Latin. And I have also known Greek scholars who knew no Sanskrit and yet attempted comparisons between the two. When Lepsius was made a Member of the Berlin Academy, Lachmann, who ought to have known better, used to say of him: “He knows many things which nobody knows, but he also is ignorant of many things which everybody knows.” Such remarks never speak well for the man who makes them.

Another disadvantage from which the aged scholar suffers is that he is blamed for not having known in his youth what has been discovered in his old age, and is still violently assailed for opinions he may have uttered fifty years ago. When quite a young man I wrote, at Baron Bunsen’s request, a long letter on the Turanian Languages. It was published in 1854, but it still continues to be criticized as if it had been published last year. Of course, considering the rapid advance of linguistic studies, a great part of that letter became antiquated long ago; but at the time of its first appearance it contained nearly all that could then be known on these allophylian, that is, non-Aryan and non-Semitic languages; and I may, perhaps, quote the opinion of Professor Pott, no mean authority at that time, who, after severely criticizing my letter, declared that it belonged to the most important publications that had appeared on linguistic subjects for many years. And yet, though I have again and again protested that I could not possibly have known in 1854 what has been discovered since as to a number of these Turanian languages, everybody who writes on any of them seems to be most anxious to show that in 1894 he knows more than I did in 1854. No astronomer is blamed for not having known the planet Neptune before its discovery in 1846, or for having been wrong in accounting for the irregularities of Saturn. But let that pass; I only share the fate of others who have lived too long.

After all, all our knowledge, whatever show we may make of it, is very imperfect, and the more we know the better we learn how little it is that we do know, and how much of unexplored country there is beyond the country which we have explored. We must judge a man by what he has done—by his own original work. There are many scholars, and very useful they are in their own way, but if their books are examined, one easily finds the stores from which they borrowed their materials. They may add some notes of their own and even some corrections, particularly corrections of the authors from whom they have borrowed most; but at the end where is the fresh ore that they have raised; where is the gold they have extracted and coined? There are cases where the original worker is quite forgotten, whereas the retailers flourish. Well, facts are facts, whether known or not known, and the triumphal chariot of truth has to be dragged along by many hands and many shoulders.

[9] Herr Geheimrath von Spiegel now lives at Munich.