He rose to take his leave, and having been informed that I meditated
a trip to London, he asked me if I would make it with him. Fearing
to intrude, I declined, and received an invitation to visit him in
England. I had at that time just read Mill's masterly work on the
philosophy of William Hamilton, was very full of it, and my mind
was burdened with a thousand philosophic questions aroused by it. I
was, therefore, greatly rejoiced that so rare an opportunity offered
itself to discuss my doubts with the author himself, and a week
later I rang the bell at the garden gate in front of Mill's country
seat in Blackheath Park, near London, that little wicket gate before
which I have never stood without a feeling of joyous expectation, and
which I have never closed behind me without a sense of having been
intellectually enriched.
My university education in Copenhagen had been an abstract metaphysical
one; the professors of philosophy of the institution were men who,
although mutually opposed to one another and supposed to be advocates
of diametrically opposite standpoints, in all essentials bore the
impress of the same school. They had begun their career as theologians,
and had later become Hegelians, some influenced by the left flank of
the Hegel school, others by the right. They had finally, together
with all the rest of the world at that time, become "emancipated
from Hegel," which, however, must be so interpreted as to admit of
Hegel's still remaining first and last in their mental sphere. The
methods of Hegel, employed now more naïvely, now in a more sophistic
way, were preached from a _cathedra_, devoted to the worship of the
absolute, the subjective-objective; his works were cited, his few
witticisms repeated, and a wearisome, never-ending controversy against
his supposed errors was carried on, from which we students gathered
that they were almost all founded on his undervaluation of the real,
especially in his faulty discernment of the natural sciences. We were
taught, however, to consider his errors more precious than the truths
of other thinkers, since truth could only be attained, as was shown by
the example of our worthy professors, by creeping through the loop-hole
of some error of Hegel. The University of Copenhagen, notwithstanding
its otherwise by no means too friendly sentiments towards Germany,
held it as an incontestable fact that modern philosophy was a German,
as ancient philosophy had been a Grecian science. The existence of
English empiricism and of French positivism was not recognized at the
university; of English philosophy, in especial, we only heard as of
a system that had long since been overthrown, and whose death-blow
had been dealt to it by Kant. It had only been possible for me, by a
vigorous effort of the will, to tear myself free, as best I could, from
the bonds of the school prevailing in Denmark, and at the period when
I met Stuart Mill I was still wavering between the speculative and the
positive tendency. I made no secret to Mill of my state of uncertainty.
"So, then, you are very familiar with Hegel," said he. "Do you
understand German?"
"To be sure I do; I read it almost as readily as I do my
mother-tongue."
"I do not understand the German language," he said, in reply, "and
have never read a line of German literature in the original. In fact,
I know so little German that when I have been in Germany, I have had
difficulty in finding my way at railroad stations and elsewhere."
"Have you made the acquaintance of the German philosophers through
translations?"
"Kant I have read in a translation, of Hegel not a syllable either in
a translation or in the original. I know him only through reviews and
refutations, best of all through a concise presentation of his views by
the only Hegelian in England,--Stirling."
"And what impressions have you received of Hegel?"
"That the writings in which Hegel has attempted to apply his principles
may perhaps contain some good things, but that everything purely
metaphysical in what he has written is sheer nonsense!"
I was startled, and suggested that I supposed this remark was to be
taken _cum grano salis_.
"No; every word is meant to be understood literally," replied he. Then
he dwelt on the outlines of the system, on the first preliminaries, the
theory of _being_ that is identified with _nothing_, and exclaimed,
"What would you expect from a whole that begins with such sophistry?
Have you really read Hegel?"
"Certainly; I have read most of his writings."