As often as I could, I took the train to Blackheath to visit John
Stuart Mill. He was good and great, and I felt myself exceedingly
attracted by his greatness. There were fundamental features of his
thought and mode of feeling that coincided with inclinations of my own;
for instance, the Utilitarian theory, as founded by Bentham and his
father and developed by him. I had written in 1868: "What we crave is
no longer to flee from society and reality with our thoughts and
desires. On the contrary, we wish to put our ideas into practice in
society and life. That we may not become a nation of poetasters, we
will simply strive towards actuality, the definite goal of Utility,
which the past generation mocked at. Who would not be glad to be even
so little useful?"
Thus I found myself mentally in a direction that led me towards Mill,
and through many years' study of Comte and Littré, through an
acquaintance with Mill's correspondence with Comte, I was prepared for
philosophical conversations concerning the fundamental thoughts of
empiric philosophy as opposed to speculative philosophy, conversations
which, on Mill's part, tended to represent my entire University
philosophical education at Copenhagen as valueless and wrong.
But what drew me the most strongly to Mill was not similarity of
thought, but the feeling of an opposed relationship. All my life I had
been afraid of going further in a direction towards which I inclined. I
had always had a passionate desire to perfect my nature--to make good
my defects. Julius Lange was so much to me because he was so unlike me.
Now I endeavoured to understand Mill's nature and make it my own,
because it was foreign to mine. By so doing I was only obeying an inner
voice that perpetually urged me. When others about me had plunged into
a subject, a language, a period, they continued to wrestle with it to
all eternity, made the thing their speciality. That I had a horror of.
I knew French well; but for fear of losing myself in French literature,
which I could easily illustrate, I was always wrestling with English or
German, which presented greater difficulties to me, but made it
impossible for me to grow narrow. I had the advantage over the European
reading world that I knew the Northern languages, but nothing was
further from my thoughts than to limit myself to opening up Northern
literature to Europe. Thus it came about that when the time in my life
arrived that I felt compelled to settle outside Denmark I chose for my
place of residence Berlin, the city with which I had fewest points in
common, and where I could consequently learn most and develop myself
without one-sidedness.
Mill's verbally expressed conviction that empiric philosophy was the
only true philosophy, made a stronger impression upon me than any
assertion of the kind that I had met with in printed books. The results
of empiric philosophy seemed to me much more firmly based than those of
the newer German philosophy. At variance with my teachers, I had come
to see that Hume had been right rather than Kant. But I could not
conform to the principle of empiric philosophy. After all, our
knowledge is not ultimately based merely on experience, but on that
which, prior to experience, alone renders experience possible.
Otherwise not even the propositions of Mathematics can be universally
applicable. In spite of my admiration for Mill's philosophical works, I
was obliged to hold to the rationalistic theory of cognition; Mill
obstinately held to the empiric. "Is not a reconciliation between the
two possible?" I said. "I think that one must _choose_ between the
theories," replied Mill. I did not then know Herbert Spencer's
profoundly thoughtful reconciliation of the teachings of the two
opposing schools. He certainly maintains, as does the English school,
that all our ideas have their root in experience, but he urges at the
same time, with the Germans, that there are innate ideas. The conscious
life of the individual, that cannot be understood from the experience
of the individual, becomes explicable from the inherited experience of
the race. Even the intellectual form which is the condition of the
individual's apprehension is gradually made up out of the experience of
the race, and consequently innate without for that reason being
independent of foregoing experiences. But I determined at once, incited
thereto by conversations with Mill, to study, not only his own works,
but the writings of James Mill, Bain, and Herbert Spencer; I would
endeavour to find out how much truth they contained, and introduce this
truth into Denmark.
I was very much surprised when Mill informed me that he had not read a
line of Hegel, either in the original or in translation, and regarded
the entire Hegelian philosophy as sterile and empty sophistry. I
mentally confronted this with the opinion of the man at the Copenhagen
University who knew the history of philosophy best, my teacher, Hans
Bröchner, who knew, so to speak, nothing of contemporary English and
French philosophy, and did not think them worth studying. I came to the
conclusion that here was a task for one who understood the thinkers of
the two directions, who did not mutually understand one another.
I thought that in philosophy, too, I knew what I wanted, and saw a road
open in front of me.
However, I never travelled it. The gift for abstract philosophical
thought which I had possessed as a youth was never developed, but much
like the tendency to verse-making which manifested itself even earlier,
superseded by the historio-critical capacity, which grew strong in me.
At that time I believed in my natural bent for philosophy, and did so
even in July, 1872, when I sketched out and began a large book: "_The
Association of Ideas, conceived and put forward as the fundamental
principle of human knowledge_," but the book was never completed. The
capacity for abstraction was too weak in me.
Still, if the capacity had no independent development, it had a
subservient effect on all my criticism, and the conversations with Mill
had a fertilising and helpful influence on my subsequent intellectual
life.