doubt, at the common schools of Nuremberg, was used as preliminary to the spelling-book), "was dealt with as if he had committed the greatest crimes."

We are happy to find that the good wire-drawer may be acquitted of the charge of instilling intolerance into his son's mind, of malice prepense. On the contrary, "he tried, being then by no means a sceptic, to teach me tolerance, by disputing with me against the dogmas, in the assumed character of a heretic" (probably of a Homoiousian, as Johann could hardly be yet qualified to test his semi-Arian statements by experience), "or of a freethinker, and I shed many tears" (surely this was unworthy of a philosopher) "when I could not find arguments to confute him. The origin of my easy conviction" (which is really surprising in the victorious opponent of grandmamma) "lay in my feeling for veracity; I could not believe that millions of men could believe an ab. surdity, and look upon the exposure of it as a crime." This comes of diffidence and self-distrust. What was the value of the opinion of a few millions of men, compared with that of Johann Benjamin Erhard, aged three years? You ought to have tested their statements by experience, Johann.

His excellent memory brought him, in this Athanasian school, little distinction, for he only "strove to learn the meaning of things, without troubling himself about the words." In his ninth year, he entered the second class of the "Latin scholars," as the public school of Nuremberg was called. The first class was preparatory to the University; and, as far as Erhard knows, "the mode of reckoning is the same at all Protestant schools, while, at the Catholic school, the first class is the lowest." Here was food for speculation-Why do they so? "Was it done by the Protestants as a mark of distinction from the Catholics, as the first Christians made the first day of the week their Sabbath?" We had indeed thought that the first day of the week was so far from being a Sabbath, that it originally co-existed with the Jewish Sabbath; but we are so little given to speculation, that we fear we might never have been puzzled by the titles of the classes in the Nuremberg school. In the Latin school, Erhard, notwithstanding his excellent

memory, learned no Latin, but he had learned arithmetic, in the mean time, at the German school; whereupon he thus reflects :

"As far as my memory goes back, I cannot remember to have learned to count;-I seem always to have been able to do it. I am equally ignorant of the time at which I exchanged the speaking of myself in the third person, which is so natural to children, for the I. Probably counting in a child succeeds the I; for, till it not merely feels itself as unity, but also thinks of itself as such, in opposition to all others, it has no fixed type (schema) of the one. It sees single things, but does not arrange them according to the abstract notion of singleness."

After two years, Erhard left the Latin school, in consequence of a reproof from a preacher whose sermon he had not attended to; and, in his self education from this time forward, we cannot but admire the free and generous spirit of the boy, who sought knowledge for the sake of knowledge. The absence of intercourse, in German society, between the middle classes and the aristocracy, removes a great danger which besets self-taught genius in England, in the tendency of eminence to break the bonds which connect a man with the companions of his youth, without raising him to a perfect level with the class into which he is removed. The son of the Nuremberg craftsman looked to no wider public than his townsmen for sympathy, and sought no reward for study but knowledge. We are haunted with a ghost, whose name is Cui Bono. Fearing and dreading the name of utilitarianism, we worship it in its meanest forms, and set up wealth and power in the place of wisdom, or, which is worse, as the ends which justify the search of wisdom as a means. Fools and blind! for which is greater, the gold on the temple, or the temple which sanctifies the gold? The vis inertia of our universities still opposes a partial resistance to the utilitarian tendencies of education; but even they are tormented into arguing on the tendency of their studies to promote success in life. "Look at the bench," they say, "crowded with wranglers."

66 Listen to the first-class man speaking in Parliament." "Who shall argue, if logic be forgotten?" "Who shall quote, when Virgil is un

read?" So the public turns sulkily away for want of an answer, and Alma-Mater goes on in her course of training, sub rosâ, the would-be judges and statesmen into men. How different is the feeling of the lonely and uninstructed German lad!

"This feeling for freedom," he says, after speaking of his sympathy with the revolt of America, "was a necessary result of my education. With all the inclination for the arts and sciences which my father had implanted in me, he never raised in my mind the notion of supporting myself by any other means than his profession. All that I learned, I learned because it gave me pleasure, or to please my father; for I loved my father so dearly, that I liked no one better as a playfellow. . . . . This education, which caused me to gain art and science for its own sake, roused in me so strong a feeling for freedom from outward compulsion, that, in the choice of my employments, I always followed either inclination or duty, and disregarded all other views, especially those of outward advantage."

From eleven to thirteen, Erhard I worked at his father's trade, and acquiring some knowledge of engraving, was able to procure with his gains a few books; among which, he enumerates Wolf's Elements, Krüjer's Theory of Nature, and, at a later period, Wolf's Elementa Matheseos. He entertained a laudable contempt for books written to suit the capacity of children, such as Natural History for Children, by Raff; and in this feeling we fully agree with him, and would

extend the same condemnation to all condescending compositions, and especially to sermons for the poor. Let a man speak to his hearers on topics they can understand and care for, to children about giants and fairies, to peasants about their fields and their homes; but let him not leave his position as a teacher, by the awkward affectation of equality with his learners. They can dispense with intelligibility, but not with earnestness; with the show of parity of knowledge, rather than with the recognition of common humanity. Children understand each other, and they understand men and women; but the mongrel character of affected puerility is as puzzling to them, as an address which we once heard a surly porter make to a persevering foreign vagrant" You not

understand me; why you not walk off, when I you tell?"

"Maxima debetur pueris reverentia;" but the debt is paid by few.

In his fourteenth year, his studies were interrupted by some alarming rassing tendency to see figures when fits of epilepsy, succeeded by a haalone, which troubled him the more,

from his full conviction of their un

reality. The propensity was evidently inherited from his grandmother, who, like him, was free from superstitious fear; but the good wo man never troubled herself about objective causality, with which Erhard considers his visions incompatible; forgetting that a morbid condition of the retina or sensorium must produce morbid results, which would be objectively cognizable to a perfect physiologist. The "pain which, in such forming a judgment objectively valid, cases, arises from the difficulty of which has for us at the same time subjective evidence," proceeds from a misconception of the judgment which ought to be formed. The phantomseer has subjective evidence that he sees phantoms; but not that they are cognizable to others, or independent of his own bodily organization.

From his twelfth to his sixteenth tal, or, as he calls it, the Siegwartyear was, in Nuremberg, the sentimengood fortune to see one of his acquainWertherisch period, and he had the

tances commit suicide, and to learn from another, named Doerburem, to fall in love. The same kind friend instilled into him a smattering of Greek, and expounded to him the New Testament, "according to the bold mode of interpretation which

was

then fashionable; "-that, we presume, of the Wolfenbuttel fragments, or of Eickhorn. His precocious genius, as might have been expected, outran his teacher, and he saw the imitations of Homer!! which show the mythical character of the sacred history. The gravity and earnestness with which he narrates the crotchets and follies of his boyhood, have a whimsical and amusing effect. It is value the convictions which he formed strange that a thinking man should in ignorance, even if on knowledge he abides by the results. But in Erhard, the boy was not the father of the man, but the man himself; and that man, though by fortune a critical philosopher, was by nature and destiny a

believer and a dogmatist. He believed, indeed, in the categories and not in the prophecies, because he was a speculator rather than a man, and the first system that satisfied the conscious wants of his intellect relieved it from craving for ever after. In some things, he appeared to be involved in the interests of common humanity. "Schiller used to relate," says Varnhagen, "that when Erhard had inherited a small house at Nuremberg, he was in a great hurry to go into the kitchen, and light a fire on the hearth, to express by this proceeding the act of taking possession. Good sound com

mon sense was more valued by him than any learning or cultivation," &c. True, perhaps; and yet it was only life in the rebound from speculation. We have seldom known an abstracted student who had not a theoretical interest in life; but it is always through a peculiar medium-he is not one among men in the first instance, but he projects an imaginary self into the midst of them, and watches his reciprocal influences upon them and from them. He delights in the symbol of ownership, but he knows that it is a symbol, and amuses himself with his own delight; for he has passed through the antithesis of the conscious subject and its object, to the comprehension of both in a common objectivity, which is at first not felt to imply, as its correlative, a common subjectivity. The reflected and secondary object is identified with the simple and primary, and this conscious developement of unconscious being forms one main element of German literature. As a characteristic specimen of the class, we have selected Erhard. He could not feel himself owner of a house, till he found a symbol to represent ideal ownership to his imagination. He exchanged theory for life, only because life was to him the emblem of a theory.

We have said that, as became a philosopher in the Siegwart-Wertherisch epoch, he fell in love, or fancied that he did so; apparently with no particular fair one, but with an idea, which the maidens of Nuremberg had the opporturnity of realizing in rotation; yet all the while he was preparing for a more permanent attachment, and he determined" to choose its object calmly, before his mind was agitated by passion." He fixed on a certain Wilhelmine, and thought that the ideal was realized;

and though, after some years, I was forced to admit my error, nothing would induce me to banish from my recollection these years of happy dreams. Every bright moonlight night carries me back still to that sweet delusion. Oh, no! it was not delusion-it was reality then; this firm trust in the harmony of our souls, this abstraction from every thing corporeal in our union, this completeness in our being. I felt myself at thy side, free from all influence of the world upon me, and infinitely strong to act upon it. In this feeling of force, the bold idea arose in my mind of being able to supply a complete theory of legislation, and making this the object of my life, since I had not yet learned to consider on what, but for what, I was to live." A true and beautiful picture of the happy enthusiasm of youth, and not to us an anticlimax, though it leads from love to legislation; for the production of theory and system was the work to which his mind was adapted by organization, and which could not but result, if a moving force was found for its mechanism; but the ἀρχὴ κινησέως is the same for all, the original energy of the will; and if its effects are not the same, through the clogging of the machine, by selfishness and worldliness, enthusiasm is the vis medicatrix naturæ, which art can but partially imitate in attempting ' ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνειν τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν.

We say enthusiasm, for of love we doubt; that cool and prudent determination to select the object first, and fall in love with her afterwards, makes us rather sceptical, and we have a lurking suspicion that real love was too human and practical a state for Erhard to be included in. An American rhetorician draws a distinction between the shopkeeper and the man in the shop, the farmer and man on the farm; and so we would say that Erhard was not a lover, but a philosopher in a condition of love. Varnhagen Von Ense takes a sound view of the question :

"The mind and spirit of the young man is all on fire; he deprecates every doubt, and every misunderstanding; he sees in her perfection, he expects from her every spiritual elevation and moral advancement; he revels in admiration and passionate devotion. And yet, with all the fire, with all the enthusiasm, with all

the tenderness which is expressed here (in his correspondence with Wilhelmine), at bottom real love, we must say it, is utterly wanting.

The passion, the anxiety, the longing, the confidence-all dispense with one distinction, which alone forms the characteristic of true love-with the need of this definite personality." This passion, he proceeds to say, might have been easily, by a freak of imagination, transferred to others. "We can, in such a case, only pity the poor girl, who, instead of being an actual object of personal love, is obliged to serve as a sort of counterpart to a metaphysical excitement, as a NotI (negation of self)." It was probably fortunate for both parties that the connexion wore itself out.

"They met and parted. Well, is there no more?

Something within that interval, that bore The stamp of why they parted, how they

met?"

There were suspicions, and doubts, and discoveries; in short, the dream ended, and Erhard awoke, and was indignant to find it was a dream. We return to the more directly intellectual development of his mind.

It was in his fifteenth year that he first felt the nature of mathematical evidence. He had learnt from Wolf the dogmatic method of deducing mathematical as well as other truths from the original notions (begriffen) of them, and had tormented himself (bis zur ohnmacht) with vain attempts to prove propositions about straight lines, &c., from his notions of them. At last, in the proposition of the equality of parallelograms on equal bases between the same parallels, the light suddenly dawned upon him, and he felt intuitive certainty, and a consciousness, which however he could not account for, of the difference between mathematical evidence and logical proof. He experienced a weaker but somewhat similar feeling, when, a year afterwards, he gained an insight into "necessary subjection to strict law."

There are probably few thinkers to whom the first revelation of formal truth is not a remembered intellectual epoch. We suspect that it is not desirable that it should first be suggested by geometry, where the close connexion of the intellectual with the sensuous vision (anschauung), and of the vision with the notions of which

VOL. XLV. NO. CCLXXXIV.

the propositions are formed, adopted by Kant as the basis of his system, inasmuch as it supplied the condition of the possibility of synthetical judgments a priori or of objective truth, and rejected by Hegel as unessential to the proposition (Phænomenologie des Geistes, p. 34), is likely to confine the attention of an unpractised thinker to the particular case of truth, accompanied by vision, instead of the form of truth, which is exemplified by a syllogism with false premises, as well as by the proposition in Euclid which enlightened Erhard. He could not, however, have used a better preparative for his approaching study of Kant.

For several years Erhard continued his course of self-education, reading in English Shaftesbury and Ossian, whose frothy rhapsodies appear to have met with greater acceptance in every part of the Continent than in England; adding to Wolf's demonstrative system, fragments from Spinoza and other philosophers; and, above all, maintaining an active intercourse or correspondence with Wilhelmine, and with two or three youthful friends. "These years," he feelingly says, "of friendship and of love, when the search for truth was the sole aim of my life, the communication of my discoveries to my friends the only reward which I wished or obtained, conversation with my beloved on friendship and love the full enjoyment of love—these years, even now, compose my true life. I shall be active as long as I live, and I have felt much pleasure since; but my life itself, without reference to any of its particular circumstances, as immediate enjoyment of being, I possessed only then, when ye, my never-to-beforgotten, formed my universe, for which I wished to exist." Varnhagen does justice to the class and the epoch to which Erhard belonged, in his remarks on his correspondence at this time with his friend Osterhausen. From the contemplation of the pursuits and thoughts of this young handicraftsman (for Erhard worked all this time at his father's trade), we may look further, he says, and contemplate a picture of civic life, which is seldom so well presented to us. "These lofty exertions and refined relations, in a rank of life which in general has little time to spend on cultivation, and little claim to make to 31

it, give the most favourable representation of our German middle class, which exercised within itself the best attributes of the nation, and for a long time almost alone maintained them." In the spring of 1786, one of Erhard's friends mentioned to him a notice of Kant's writings which he had seen, from which it appeared that he attacked the foundation of the Wolfian dogmatism; and, like a gallant partisan, immediately determined to read Kant's works, and refute them. In the transcendental æsthetic he found nothing strange, as he had been familiarized by the system of Leibnitz to the doctrine of the ideality of time and space, He passed easily through the analytic (doctrine of the categories of the understanding), and first recognised the opposition of Kant's critical to Wolf's dogmatic philosophy in the parallogisms of the pure reason. In the Antinomies (proofs of contrary propositions, as of the infinity and finiteness of time, the infinite or ultimate divisibility of matter, &c.), he discovered, he says, the play upon words in the assertion, that time and space were objects for a notion (begriff), and could again be known from the notion; "but with this insight vanished the show of logical necessity (dialektische schein), which prevails in Wolf's system, and must necessarily overcome a reason nurtured in obedience to faith, which chooses to beautify its faith by representing it as the choice of freedom." He felt, he says, a new intellectual life, "unrestrained by all that men choose to make one another believe, and undisturbed in my faith, which was not contrary to reason, by the objection that I could not formally prove it." In short, he had learned that if the speculative reason cannot give positive answers to its own questions, it can solve them in the only manner in which they admit of being solved, by showing their insolubility. Whether he had fully learned to give unto reason the things that be reason's, and unto faith the things that be faith's, may perhaps admit of doubt; but he had ascertained that the domains and functions were distinct.

For the intellectual residence he had now built, he had not long to wait for an inhabitant. He was satisfied as to the forms by which all is to be known, the principles and limits on which judgments are to be formed; but

where to find things to be known or judged in an independent existence and vitality, he had first to learn from this great master's Critical Enquiry of the Practical Reason. Let those who are enthusiastic in an election, or exuberantly joyful at a windfall of money, respect and tolerate the feelings of the satisfied searcher after truth:"All enjoyment which I ever received in my life," says the lover of Wilhelmine, "vanishes in comparisonwith the agitation of my whole mind, which I felt at many passages of the book. Tears of extreme pleasure often fell on this book, and even the recollection of these happy days ever moistens my eyes, and has raised me up when I was downcast and melancholy. . If I am to persevere in the struggle with the depressing thought, which the history of the time often breathes into me like an evil demon, that the development of manhood, among the acts and dealings of men, is an old woman's tale, &c. .

It is thy work, my teacher, my father in the spirit, and I feel myself strengthened by the consciousness. I am what I am no other has my duties-no other can think for me; the world which I look on, is a problem for my faculties of knowledge. It is thy work, my teacher, my father in the spirit." "Here," he proceeds, "my philosophical education closed itself: I recurred no more to first prineiples, but sought rather to make what use I could of my philosophy in other sciences." "Erhard," says Varnhagen, "finds all now certain and secure; his convictions are decided, one might almost say stiffened, for his whole life, no more to be loosened by dialectic toil." He proceeds to speak of the philosophy of Kant in action"It presses forward into life; as doctrine, as example, as message, it forces itself in every direction; all the enlightened and the active take an interest in it; it is like a new religion spreading. . We see it shine forth as the object of the highest relations and wants of a wide circle of mankind, from Konigsberg to Hamburg and Copenhagen, and to Vienna and Trieste; we see how it awakes and inspires-how it makes the highest promises, and at last gives only an insufficient satisfaction. The noblest, the most gifted of the mature and of the young, nay, even women, try the path with zeal, and even reach the