Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 6. Young Germany

by Georg Brandes

He was a wretched orator, this professor, but a wonderful thinker and expounder. The technical terms he employed were bewildering—that extraordinary terminology in which "an sich" meant according to its constitution, and "an und für sich," the completed, absolute existence; but his hearers became accustomed to it, and soon began to feel as if they were floating above the earth in abstractions so refined and so ingeniously complementary that the dialectic of Plato's Parmenides seemed clumsy in comparison; at times as if they were penetrating ever deeper into ever more concrete subjects. The speaker's voice grew stronger, he looked round with a free, confident glance while, with a few pregnant words, he characterised an intellectual movement, an age, a nation, or some specially remarkable individual, such as that nephew of Rameau's who, without being named, is described in the Phænomenology.

The novice who heard the famous thinker propound, without any illustration, the abstract ideas which applied to everything—spirit and nature, matter and mind—ideas of which it was said that they enclosed the seen and the unseen in their mysteriously but methodically woven net—might at first feel tempted to run away, or at any rate not to come back again.

But he did come back, for the laborious delivery soon fascinated him, and he began to feel that he was making progress. Every now and then a lightning-flash of thought illuminated the darkness. The pupil began to comprehend that, in his master's mind, there was no question of this being a system like other systems, a more profound or more comprehensive plan of instruction than other plans, but that the man regarded himself as the originator of an entirely new science, which comprehended the whole of existence, explained everything, God and the world, and was the completion of everything; for the thoughts of all earlier thinkers were discernible in his system, as all the lower animal forms are traceable in the human embryo; everything that had gone before had prepared his way, all endeavours found their fulfilment in him; from this time forwards progress could only lie in the direction of more special development of the separate sections of the great completed plan.

The pupil was henceforth under the master's magic spell. The very abstruseness of the terminology was now an attraction the more; difficulties acted as spurs; it seemed to him a point of honour, a matter of vital importance, that he should understand. And with what rapture he understood!—understood that the whole world of sense was only appearance; the great reality was thought. These separate, individual appearances were not real, not true, only the universal was real. I think, and by inevitable laws the progress of my thought leads me to the complete understanding of myself and of the world. I think my own thought, not regarding it as my own, but as the universal thought, as the thought of all other human intelligences in union with mine; I deprive them all of the individuality which appears to be essential but is not, and see in all these intelligences one intelligence, and in it the principle of existence. This first principle, which finds its highest expression in man, is that which permeates, which creates the world. This first principle, which works and creates blindly in nature, is in me conscious of itself. The absolute, the idea, that which is popularly known as God, is not a conscious or personal being, for consciousness and personality presuppose the existence of something outside the consciousness and personality; and yet it is not quite unconscious. Man's consciousness of God is God's self-consciousness. I cease to live as a single, fortuitous human being, in order to feel the universal life live and pulsate in me.

Logic, which has been nothing but a sort of childish scholastic discipline, which inculcated self-evident facts by the aid of barbaric formulæ (Barbara, Celarent, Ferio, Camestres, Baroco), logic, which had languished and died in ignominy long ago, came to life again in the doctrine of the thoughts of existence in their connection and their unity; for the first thought necessitated, produced the second, amalgamated with it into a third, which in its turn summoned up its antithesis, which was at the same time its complement. Thought of necessity produced thought, until the thought-serpent set its tooth into its own tail, thus forming one inviolable circle, from which the realms of nature and spirit again detached themselves, dropping as the rings dropped from Draupner, the ring of Odin.

And all the sciences came and drank of the new metaphysic, as of a fountain of life, and all renewed their youth. And the system gradually rose before the disciple's eye, homogeneous, carefully articulated, severely symmetrical, of an internal infinity, a spiritual Organon, a gigantic Gothic cathedral, every little part of which repeated the whole, every little triad the great Trinity—thought, nature, and spirit. It rose, built upon the granite foundation of thought, all the buttresses and arches of the realm of nature supporting it as it mounted towards the spirit, soaring to heaven in the mighty three-storied tower of which religion formed the lowest, art the middle, and philosophy the highest course.

But even more to the disciple than the system was the method. For the method, the imperative thought-process, was the key to earth and to heaven. It was by virtue of the method that he understood. It was by virtue of the method that he saw the history of the world to be a connected drama, one grand drama of liberation, in which every race had its part, and all the parts were interdependent.

It was, after all, a truly great thought-poem, which men took for a scientific demonstration; a new species of poetry, more dramatic and more masterly in construction than that which Schelling's intellectual perception had revealed to him; a new intoxicant, more subtle and potent than that provided by the natural philosopher. The system has, indeed, collapsed, the machinery of the method, too fine and intricate, has come to pieces in our hands; only a few of the great fundamental thoughts remain. But he who in his early youth has passed through the Hegel period in his own mental experience, perfectly understands the rapturous enthusiasm of the youth of that day, and the strength they drew from these cosmic thoughts, world-ideas.

Among Hegel's pupils about the year 1830 there were already master-thinkers like Hotho, Gans, Marheineke, Michelet; and almost all the men of mark who appeared in the most diverse intellectual domains from this time until far on in the Fifties, belonged at first to the Hegelian school—Rosenkranz and Werder, Strauss and Fischer, Feuerbach, Marx, and Lassalle. Cousin came from France, Heiberg from Denmark, Vera from Naples, to fit themselves for propagating his doctrines in their native countries.

From the professorial chair in Berlin, the Hegelian philosophy spread throughout Germany, throughout the earth. Seldom or never has a spiritual monarch's throne stood so secure. At the time of Hegel's death (by cholera) in 1831, his followers compared him to Aristotle, to Alexander the Great, even to Christ.