This great intellectual achievement awakened my deepest interest. I went
at once to the library, and Unger selected the books which seemed best
adapted to give me further instruction.
I returned with Champollion's Grammaire Hieroglyphique, Lepsius's Lettre
a Rosellini, and unfortunately with some misleading writings by
Seyffarth.
How often afterward, returning in the evening from some entertainment, I
have buried myself in the grammar and tried to write hieroglyphics.
True, I strove still more frequently and persistently to follow the
philosopher Lotze.
Obedient to a powerful instinct, my untrained intellect had sought to
read the souls of men. Now I learned through Lotze to recognize the body
as the instrument to which the emotions of the soul, the harmonies and
discords of the mental and emotional life, owe their origin.
I intended later to devote myself earnestly to the study of physiology,
for without it Lotze could be but half understood; and from physiologists
emanated the conflict which at that time so deeply stirred the learned
world.
In Gottingen especially the air seemed, as it were, filled with
physiological and other questions of the natural sciences.
In that time of the most sorrowful reaction the political condition of
Germany was so wretched that any discussion concerning it was gladly
avoided. I do not remember having attended a single debate on that topic
in the circles of the students with which I was nearly connected.
But the great question "Materialism or Antimaterialism" still agitated
the Georgia Augusta, in whose province the conflict had assumed still
sharper forms, owing to Rudolf Wagner's speech during the convention of
the Guttingen naturalists three years prior to my entrance.
Carl Vogt's "Science and Bigotry" exerted a powerful influence, owing to
the sarcastic tone in which the author attacked his calmer adversary. In
the honest conviction of profound knowledge, the clever, vigorous
champion of materialism endeavoured to brand the opponents of his dogmas
with the stigma of absurdity, and those who flattered themselves with the
belief that they belonged to the ranks of the "strong-minded" followed
his standard.
Hegel's influence was broken, Schelling's idealism had been thrust aside.
The solid, easily accessible fare of the materialists was especially
relished by those educated in the natural sciences, and Vogt's maxim,
that thought stands in a similar relation to th
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