One of the masters who had taught me at school, a very erudite philologian, now Dr. Oscar Siesbye, offered me gratuitous instruction, and with his help several of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, various things of Plato's, and comedies by Plautus and Terence were carefully studied.
Frederik Nutzhorn read the Edda and the Niebelungenlied with me in the originals; with Jens Paludan-Müller I went through the New Testament in Greek, and with Julius Lange, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Horace and Ovid, and a little of Aristotle and Theocritus. Catullus, Martial and Caesar I read for myself.
But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year. In philosophy I had hitherto mastered only a few books by Sören Kierkegaard. But now I began a conscientious study of Heiberg's philosophical writings and honestly endeavoured to make myself familiar with his speculative logic. As Heiberg's Prose Writings came out, in the 1861 edition, they were studied with extreme care. Heiberg's death in 1860 was a great grief to me; as a thinker I had loved and revered him. The clearness of form and the internal obscurity of his adaptation of Hegel's Teachings, gave one a certain artistic satisfaction, at the same time that it provoked an effort really to understand.
But in the nature of things, Heiberg's philosophical life-work could not to a student be other than an admission into Hegel's train of thought, and an introduction to the master's own works. I was not aware that by 1860 Europe had long passed his works by in favour of more modern thinking. With a passionate desire to reach a comprehension of the truth, I grappled with the System, began with the Encyclopaedia, read the three volumes of Aesthetics, The Philosophy of Law, the Philosophy of History, the Phenomenology of the Mind, then the Philosophy of Law again, and finally the Logic, the Natural Philosophy and the Philosophy of the Mind in a veritable intoxication of comprehension and delight. One day, when a young girl towards whom I felt attracted had asked me to go and say good-bye to her before her departure, I forgot the time, her journey, and my promise to her, over my Hegel. As I walked up and down my room I chanced to pull my watch out of my pocket, and realised that I had missed my appointment and that the girl must have started long ago.
Hegel's Philosophy of Law had a charm for me as a legal student, partly on account of the superiority with which the substantial quality of Hegel's mind is there presented, and partly on account of the challenge in the attitude of the book to accepted opinions and expressions, "morality" here being almost the only thing Hegel objects to.
But it was the book on Aesthetics that charmed me most of all. It was easy to understand, and yet weighty, superabundantly rich.
Again and again while reading Hegel's works I felt carried away with delight at the new world of thought opening out before me. And when anything that for a long time had been incomprehensible to me, at last after tenacious reflection became clear, I felt what I myself called "an unspeakable bliss." Hegel's system of thought, anticipatory of experience, his German style, overburdened with arbitrarily constructed technical words from the year 1810, which one might think would daunt a young student of another country and another age, only meant to me difficulties which it was a pleasure to overcome. Sometimes it was not Hegelianism itself that seemed the main thing. The main thing was that I was learning to know a world-embracing mind; I was being initiated into an attempt to comprehend the universe which was half wisdom and half poetry; I was obtaining an insight into a method which, if scientifically unsatisfying, and on that ground already abandoned by investigators, was fruitful and based upon a clever, ingenuous, highly intellectual conception of the essence of truth; I felt myself put to school to a great intellectual leader, and in this school I learnt to think.
I might, it is true, have received my initiation in a school built up on more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much time, been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly had I been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed me in a school in which historical sources were examined more critically, but not less intelligently, and in which respect for individuality was greater. But such as the school was, I derived from it all the benefit it could afford to my ego, and I perceived with delight that my intellectual progress was being much accelerated. Consequently it did not specially take from my feeling of having attained a measure of scientific insight, when I learnt--what I had not known at first--that my teachers, Hans Bröchner, as well as Rasmus Nielsen, were agreed not to remain satisfied with the conclusions of the German philosopher, had "got beyond Hegel." At the altitude to which the study of philosophy had now lifted me, I saw that the questions with which I had approached Science were incorrectly formulated, and they fell away of themselves, even without being answered. Words that had filled men's minds for thousands of years, God, Infinity, Thought, Nature and Mind, Freedom and Purpose, all these words acquired another and a deeper meaning, were stamped with a new character, acquired a new value, and the depurated ideas which they now expressed opposed each other, and combined with each other, until the universe was seen pierced by a plexus of thoughts, and resting calmly within it.
Viewed from these heights, the petty and the every-day matters which occupied the human herd seemed so contemptible. Of what account, for instance, was the wrangling in the Senate and the Parliament of a little country like Denmark compared with Hegel's vision of the mighty march, inevitable and determined by spiritual laws, of the idea of Freedom, through the world's History! And of what account was the daily gossip of the newspapers, compared with the possibility now thrown open of a life of eternal ideals, lived in and for them!