Chapter III

He rose to take his leave, and having been informed that I meditated a trip to London, he asked me if I would make it with him. Fearing to intrude, I declined, and received an invitation to visit him in England. I had at that time just read Mill's masterly work on the philosophy of William Hamilton, was very full of it, and my mind was burdened with a thousand philosophic questions aroused by it. I was, therefore, greatly rejoiced that so rare an opportunity offered itself to discuss my doubts with the author himself, and a week later I rang the bell at the garden gate in front of Mill's country seat in Blackheath Park, near London, that little wicket gate before which I have never stood without a feeling of joyous expectation, and which I have never closed behind me without a sense of having been intellectually enriched.

My university education in Copenhagen had been an abstract metaphysical one; the professors of philosophy of the institution were men who, although mutually opposed to one another and supposed to be advocates of diametrically opposite standpoints, in all essentials bore the impress of the same school. They had begun their career as theologians, and had later become Hegelians, some influenced by the left flank of the Hegel school, others by the right. They had finally, together with all the rest of the world at that time, become "emancipated from Hegel," which, however, must be so interpreted as to admit of Hegel's still remaining first and last in their mental sphere. The methods of Hegel, employed now more naïvely, now in a more sophistic way, were preached from a _cathedra_, devoted to the worship of the absolute, the subjective-objective; his works were cited, his few witticisms repeated, and a wearisome, never-ending controversy against his supposed errors was carried on, from which we students gathered that they were almost all founded on his undervaluation of the real, especially in his faulty discernment of the natural sciences. We were taught, however, to consider his errors more precious than the truths of other thinkers, since truth could only be attained, as was shown by the example of our worthy professors, by creeping through the loop-hole of some error of Hegel. The University of Copenhagen, notwithstanding its otherwise by no means too friendly sentiments towards Germany, held it as an incontestable fact that modern philosophy was a German, as ancient philosophy had been a Grecian science. The existence of English empiricism and of French positivism was not recognized at the university; of English philosophy, in especial, we only heard as of a system that had long since been overthrown, and whose death-blow had been dealt to it by Kant. It had only been possible for me, by a vigorous effort of the will, to tear myself free, as best I could, from the bonds of the school prevailing in Denmark, and at the period when I met Stuart Mill I was still wavering between the speculative and the positive tendency. I made no secret to Mill of my state of uncertainty.

"So, then, you are very familiar with Hegel," said he. "Do you understand German?"

"To be sure I do; I read it almost as readily as I do my mother-tongue."

"I do not understand the German language," he said, in reply, "and have never read a line of German literature in the original. In fact, I know so little German that when I have been in Germany, I have had difficulty in finding my way at railroad stations and elsewhere."

"Have you made the acquaintance of the German philosophers through translations?"

"Kant I have read in a translation, of Hegel not a syllable either in a translation or in the original. I know him only through reviews and refutations, best of all through a concise presentation of his views by the only Hegelian in England,--Stirling."

"And what impressions have you received of Hegel?"

"That the writings in which Hegel has attempted to apply his principles may perhaps contain some good things, but that everything purely metaphysical in what he has written is sheer nonsense!"

I was startled, and suggested that I supposed this remark was to be taken _cum grano salis_.

"No; every word is meant to be understood literally," replied he. Then he dwelt on the outlines of the system, on the first preliminaries, the theory of _being_ that is identified with _nothing_, and exclaimed, "What would you expect from a whole that begins with such sophistry? Have you really read Hegel?"

"Certainly; I have read most of his writings."

Mill (with a highly incredulous air), "And you have understood him?"

"I think so; at least, in all the principal features of his works."

He (with almost naïve astonishment), "But is there actually anything to understand?"

I did what I could to reply to this singular and rather diffusive question, and Mill, by no means convinced, yet as though he entered into my thought, said, "I understand very well the reverence, or the gratitude, you cherish for Hegel. We are always grateful to those who have taught us to think."

Never have I felt so keenly, as during this conversation, how thoroughly Mill was a man cast in one mould, a genuine Englishman, wilful and obstinate, equipped with a singularly iron will, and absolutely devoid of any flexible critical power of appropriation. What took the deepest hold of me, however, was the impression of the ignorance in which the most noteworthy men of different countries, even of the few lands most closely akin to their own, are of their mutual merits, and that in this second half of our nineteenth century. It seemed to me one could do much good by simply studying, confronting, and understanding these great minds that fail to understand one another.

I endeavored to bring into play against the principles of empirical philosophy the mode of contemplation I owed to my university training. To my astonishment, all the arguments I brought forward, and on whose effect upon Mill I had counted much, had long been familiar to him. "Those," said he, "are the old German arguments." He traced them all back to Kant, and had his answers to them ready.

It would not be in place in these pages to treat of the real significance of the controversy between the two modern schools, a problem which, in Germany, by almost all thinkers, is solved from the Teutonic point of view; as a matter of course, Stuart Mill would not admit that David Hume had been refuted by Kant, an opinion which I now thoroughly share with him, and which I believe will be universally prevalent when the Kant worship begins to be somewhat on the decline. (I already find a trace of this change of conception in Germany in Fr. Paulsen's admirable work on Kant's "Theory of Knowledge.") At that time, to be sure, I had a presentiment that there must be some way of reconciling the rationalistic and the empiric theory of knowledge, but I did not yet know Herpert Spencer's simple solution of the problem. Mill spoke briefly but decidedly against all attempts at mediation, and concluded, with the mingling of modesty and decision that was peculiar to him, in the following words, which have remained fixed in my memory, "I believe that we must choose between the theories."

In the same spirit he expressed himself concerning the various modern philosophers, whose thought was nearly related to his own. He recommended me to become acquainted with Herbert Spencer, yet would not advise me, he said, to study Spencer's later works; he thought that in these Spencer had deviated from the "good method." On the other hand, he urgently commended to me Spencer's "Principles of Psychology," and the two chief works of his, in my estimation, far less intellectual contemporary Bain,--"The Senses and the Intellect" and "The Emotions and the Will." He presented me with a copy of the "Analysis of the Human Mind," by his much-revered father (the edition prepared and supplied with notes by himself and Bain), extolling the book to me as the main work of the English school in this century; and I having expressed to him my admiration of his critique of Hamilton's philosophy, he sent me the book the very next day. Almost of itself the conversation fell on Taine's recently issued volume, "De l'intelligence," in which Mill is so zealously investigated, profited by, and refuted, and in which the English tendency has perhaps placed its most enduring monument in French philosophy. Mill praised Taine, called his book one of the most profound and important works of modern France, and said about the same things to me regarding it that I found repeated later in his review of it ("Fortnightly Review," July, 1870). As a whole, he liked the book; but he had the same kind of objections to offer against the last chapters as against the later works of Herbert Spencer. We must, according to his conviction, most decidedly "choose," once for all, between the conditional knowledge of empiricism and the absolute certainty of intuition, and Taine, in the last volume of his work, had attempted to establish axioms which, not being derived from experience, had validity for the whole universe, independent of the boundaries of our experience. Mill, himself, thought, as is well known, that even the propositions of algebra and of geometry, whose empiric origin he endeavored to establish, could only be sure of a limited dominion. He extolled to me the little book "Essays by a Barrister," from which he himself quoted a few sentences. The barrister finds it quite conceivable that our multiplication-table, as well as our Euclid, may be utterly valueless in another solar system. "The question is," he says, "whether our certainty of the truth of the multiplication table arises from experience or from a transcendental conviction, excited by experience, but anterior to and formative of it." To illustrate the former of these views he presents a few striking examples:--

"There is a world in which, whenever two pairs of things are either placed in proximity or are contemplated together, a fifth thing is immediately created, and brought within the contemplation of the mind engaged in putting two and two together. This is surely neither inconceivable, for we can readily conceive the result by thinking of common puzzle tricks, nor can it be said to be beyond the power of Omnipotence, yet, in such a world, surely two and two may be five; that is, the result to the mind of contemplating two twos would be to count five. This shows that it is not inconceivable that two and two might make five; but, on the other hand, it is perfectly easy to see why in this world we are absolutely certain that two and two make four. There is probably not an instant of our lives, in which we are not experiencing the fact. We see it whenever we count four books, four tables or chairs, four men in the street, or the four comers of a paving stone, and we feel more sure of it than of the rising of the sun to-morrow, because our experience upon the subject is so much wider, and applies to such an infinitely greater number of cases. Nor is it true that every one who has once been brought to see it is equally sure of it. A boy who has just learned the multiplication table is pretty sure that twice two are four, but is often extremely doubtful whether or not seven times nine are sixty-three. If his teacher told him that twice two made five, his certainty would be greatly impaired.

"It would be possible to put a case of a world, in which two straight lines should be universally supposed to include a space. Imagine a man, who had never had any experience of straight lines through the medium of any sense whatever, suddenly placed upon a railway, stretching out on a perfectly straight line to an indefinite distance in each direction. He would see the rails, which would be the first straight lines he ever saw, apparently meeting, or at least tending to meet, at each horizon; and he would thus infer in the absence of all other experience that they actually did enclose a space, when produced far enough. Experience alone could undeceive him. A world in which every object was round with the exception of a straight, inaccessible railway, would be a world in which every one would believe that two straight lines enclosed a space." In his conversation, Mr. Mill expressed his adherence to these humorous sophistries, which have been so keenly criticised by Spencer, and he added, "If we possessed the sense of sight without the sense of touch, we would have no doubt that two or more bodies might exist in the same place, so completely is every so-called _a priori_ axiom dependent on the character of our organs and experiences."