About the same time as my legal studies were thus beginning, I planned
out a study of Philosophy and Aesthetics on a large scale as well. My
day was systematically filled up from early morning till late at night,
and there was time for everything, for ancient and modern languages,
for law lessons with the coach, for the lectures in philosophy which
Professors H. Bröchner and R. Nielsen were holding for more advanced
students, and for independent reading of a literary, scientific and
historic description.
One of the masters who had taught me at school, a very erudite
philologian, now Dr. Oscar Siesbye, offered me gratuitous instruction,
and with his help several of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides,
various things of Plato's, and comedies by Plautus and Terence were
carefully studied.
Frederik Nutzhorn read the _Edda_ and the _Niebelungenlied_ with me in
the originals; with Jens Paludan-Müller I went through the New
Testament in Greek, and with Julius Lange, Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Pindar, Horace and Ovid, and a little of Aristotle and Theocritus.
Catullus, Martial and Caesar I read for myself.
But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I
approached my nineteenth year. In philosophy I had hitherto mastered
only a few books by Sören Kierkegaard. But now I began a conscientious
study of Heiberg's philosophical writings and honestly endeavoured to
make myself familiar with his speculative logic. As Heiberg's _Prose
Writings_ came out, in the 1861 edition, they were studied with extreme
care. Heiberg's death in 1860 was a great grief to me; as a thinker I
had loved and revered him. The clearness of form and the internal
obscurity of his adaptation of Hegel's Teachings, gave one a certain
artistic satisfaction, at the same time that it provoked an effort
really to understand.
But in the nature of things, Heiberg's philosophical life-work could
not to a student be other than an admission into Hegel's train of
thought, and an introduction to the master's own works. I was not aware
that by 1860 Europe had long passed his works by in favour of more
modern thinking. With a passionate desire to reach a comprehension of
the truth, I grappled with the System, began with the Encyclopaedia,
read the three volumes of Aesthetics, The Philosophy of Law, the
Philosophy of History, the Phenomenology of the Mind, then the
Philosophy of Law again, and finally the Logic, the Natural Philosophy
and the Philosophy of the Mind in a veritable intoxication of
comprehension and delight. One day, when a young girl towards whom I
felt attracted had asked me to go and say good-bye to her before her
departure, I forgot the time, her journey, and my promise to her, over
my Hegel. As I walked up and down my room I chanced to pull my watch
out of my pocket, and realised that I had missed my appointment and
that the girl must have started long ago.
Hegel's Philosophy of Law had a charm for me as a legal student, partly
on account of the superiority with which the substantial quality of
Hegel's mind is there presented, and partly on account of the challenge
in the attitude of the book to accepted opinions and expressions,
"morality" here being almost the only thing Hegel objects to.
But it was the book on Aesthetics that charmed me most of all. It was
easy to understand, and yet weighty, superabundantly rich.
Again and again while reading Hegel's works I felt carried away with
delight at the new world of thought opening out before me. And when
anything that for a long time had been incomprehensible to me, at last
after tenacious reflection became clear, I felt what I myself called
"an unspeakable bliss." Hegel's system of thought, anticipatory of
experience, his German style, overburdened with arbitrarily constructed
technical words from the year 1810, which one might think would daunt a
young student of another country and another age, only meant to me
difficulties which it was a pleasure to overcome. Sometimes it was not
Hegelianism itself that seemed the main thing. The main thing was that
I was learning to know a world-embracing mind; I was being initiated
into an attempt to comprehend the universe which was half wisdom and
half poetry; I was obtaining an insight into a method which, if
scientifically unsatisfying, and on that ground already abandoned by
investigators, was fruitful and based upon a clever, ingenuous, highly
intellectual conception of the essence of truth; I felt myself put to
school to a great intellectual leader, and in this school I learnt to
think.
I might, it is true, have received my initiation in a school built up
on more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much
time, been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly
had I been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed
me in a school in which historical sources were examined more
critically, but not less intelligently, and in which respect for
individuality was greater. But such as the school was, I derived from
it all the benefit it could afford to my _ego_, and I perceived with
delight that my intellectual progress was being much accelerated.
Consequently it did not specially take from my feeling of having
attained a measure of scientific insight, when I learnt--what I had not
known at first--that my teachers, Hans Bröchner, as well as Rasmus
Nielsen, were agreed not to remain satisfied with the conclusions of
the German philosopher, had "got beyond Hegel." At the altitude to
which the study of philosophy had now lifted me, I saw that the
questions with which I had approached Science were incorrectly
formulated, and they fell away of themselves, even without being
answered. Words that had filled men's minds for thousands of years,
God, Infinity, Thought, Nature and Mind, Freedom and Purpose, all these
words acquired another and a deeper meaning, were stamped with a new
character, acquired a new value, and the depurated ideas which they now
expressed opposed each other, and combined with each other, until the
universe was seen pierced by a plexus of thoughts, and resting calmly
within it.
Viewed from these heights, the petty and the every-day matters which
occupied the human herd seemed so contemptible. Of what account, for
instance, was the wrangling in the Senate and the Parliament of a
little country like Denmark compared with Hegel's vision of the mighty
march, inevitable and determined by spiritual laws, of the idea of
Freedom, through the world's History! And of what account was the daily
gossip of the newspapers, compared with the possibility now thrown open
of a life of eternal ideals, lived in and for them!