My Autobiography: A Fragment

by F. Max Müller

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 worship 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 classical scholars from whom they differed, as Hermann did from Otfried Müller, 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 assembly 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 membership 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 glasses 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 passed 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 passed 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 identity 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 passed 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 God, ascend and descend from heaven to earth. We must remember that the true Hegelian regarded the Ideas as the thoughts of God. 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 God, 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 God, and that it is in the self-conscious spirit of humanity that the ideal God 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 God, and that human thought was but a repetition 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), passing through a new process of space 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 repetition 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 passed 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 pass 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 Heraclitus: “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 space and time were nothing by themselves; that we ourselves gave the form of space 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 space 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 analysis 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 documents 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 principal 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.