My Autobiography Part 5

29. Plauti Trinumus Becker.

Winter term, 1842.

30. Prabodha Chandrodaya Brockhaus.

31. History of Indian Literature The same.

32. Aristophanes' Vespae Hermann.

33. Plauti Rudens The same.

34. Greek Syntax The same.

35. Juvenal Becker.

36. Metaphysics and Logic Weisse.

37. Philosophy of History The same.

38. Greek and Latin Seminary Hermann & Klotze.

39. Latin Society Haupt.

40. Philosophical Society Weisse.

41. Philosophical Society Drobisch.

Summer term, 1843.

42. Greek and Latin Seminary Hermann & Klotze.

43. Philosophical Society Drobisch.

44. Philosophical Society Weisse.

45. Soma-deva Brockhaus.

46. Hitopadesa The same.

47. History of Greeks and Romans Wachs.m.u.th.

48. History of Civilization The same.

49. History after the Fifteenth Century Flathe.

50. History of Ancient Philosophy Niedner.

Winter term, 1843-4.

51. Rig-veda Brockhaus.

52. Elementa Persica Fleischer.

53. Greek and Latin Seminary Hermann & Klotze.

Here my _Collegien-Buch_ breaks off, the fact being that I was preparing to go to Berlin to hear the lectures of Bopp and Sch.e.l.ling.

It will be clear from the above list that I certainly attempted too much. I ought either to have devoted all my time to cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sics, 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sical scholars from whom they differed, as Hermann did from Otfried Muller, 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 a.s.sembly 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 members.h.i.+p 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 gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 ident.i.ty 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, ascend and descend from heaven to earth. We must remember that the true Hegelian regarded the Ideas as the thoughts of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, and that it is in the self-conscious spirit of humanity that the ideal G.o.d 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 G.o.d, and that human thought was but a repet.i.tion 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_), pa.s.sing through a new process of s.p.a.ce 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 repet.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 Herac.l.i.tus: "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 s.p.a.ce and time were nothing by themselves; that we ourselves gave the form of s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 doc.u.ments 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.n.a.lysing 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.serted 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_, G.o.d, 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sumed a more general, more comprehensive, and more exalted meaning. It did not yet mean what the Greeks called ?e?? or G.o.ds, 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 G.o.ds, but of course the most opposite meanings had cl.u.s.tered 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 a.n.a.lysis and historical genealogy would support each other, there are ever so many cases where etymological a.n.a.lysis is as hopeless as logical a.n.a.lysis. Who is to define _romantic_, in such expressions as romantic literature. Etymologically we know that romantic goes back finally to Rome, but the ma.s.s 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 _uber 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 professors.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sical 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 Wurzburg, 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 cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p. 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 Ris.h.i.+s 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 G.o.ds, 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds, and from nature's G.o.d to a more sublime unseen and spiritual power. All this seemed to pa.s.s before our very eyes in the Veda, and then to be reflected in Homer and Pindar.

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

Some details of this restored picture of the world of G.o.ds 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 _ayush_, likewise derived from _i_, to go, forms its locative _ayus.h.i.+_. _ayus.h.i.+_, or originally _ayasi_, 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 _ayus_. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances, and whether there are not some of these circ.u.mstances 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 circ.u.mstances 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, _matar_, remains the bearer of children, though _ma_ is no longer used in that sense in any of the Aryan languages. _Pati_ is the lord, the strong one-therefore the husband; _vadhu_, 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 a.n.a.logy.

_Bhratar_, _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 G.o.d. It is enough for us to see that the relations.h.i.+p 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-dhava_, 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 quant.i.ty in any etymology, great was his delight, and his sarcasm truly withering, particularly as it was poured out in very cla.s.sical 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 Muller, 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.