XVI.
Meanwhile, the examination was taking its course. As real curiosities, I here reproduce the questions set me. The three to be replied to in writing were:
1. To what extent can poetry be called the ideal History?
2. In what manner may the philosophical ideas of Spinoza and Fichte lead to a want of appreciation of the idea of beauty?
3. In what relation does the comic stand to its limitations and its various contrasts?
The three questions which were to be replied to in lectures before the University ran as follows:
1. Show, through poems in our literature, to what extent poetry may venture to set itself the task of presenting the Idea in a form coinciding with the philosophical understanding of it?
2. Point out the special contributions to a philosophical definition of the Idea made by Aesthetics in particular.
3. What are the merits and defects of Schiller's tragedies?
These questions, in conjunction with the main question, may well be designated a piece of contemporary history; they depict exactly both the Science of the time and the peculiar philosophical language it adopted. Hardly more than one, or at most two, of them could one imagine set to- day.
After the final (and best) lecture, on Schiller, which was given at six hours' notice on April 25th, the judges, Hauch, Nielsen and Bröchner, deliberated for about ten minutes, then called in the auditors and R. Nielsen read aloud the following verdict: "The candidate, in his long essay, in the shorter written tests, and in his oral lectures, has manifested such knowledge of his subject, such intellectual maturity, and such originality in the treatment of his themes, that we have on that account unanimously awarded him the mark: admissus cum laude praecipua."