Hegel as a man of weak
character, and Dr. Francis Lieber, who had been under his instruction,
had the same opinion of him. In the days of the Napoleonic invasion of
Germany, Lieber had gone into the field, with other young men of the
university. When, recovered from a severe wound, he took his place again
among the students of philosophy, Hegel before beginning the day's
lecture cried: "Let all those fools who went out against the French
depart from this class."

I think that I must have had by nature an especial sensitiveness to
language, as the following trifling narration will show. I was perhaps
twelve years old when Rev. James Richmond, who had studied in Germany,
dining at my father's house, spoke of one of his German professors who
was wont, as the prelude to his exercise, to exclaim: "Aus, aus, ihr
Fremden." These words meant nothing to me then, but when, eight years
later, I mastered the German tongue, I recalled them perfectly, and
understood their meaning.

One of my first efforts, after my return from Europe in 1851, was to
acquaint myself with the "Philosophie Positive" of Auguste Comte. This
was in accordance with the advice of my friend, Horace Wallace, who,
indeed, lent me the first volume of the work. The synoptical view of the
sciences therein presented revealed to me an entirely new aspect of
thought.

I did not, for a moment, adopt Comte's views of religion, neither did I
at all agree in his wholesale condemnation of metaphysics, which
appeared to me self-contradictory, his own system involving metaphysical
distinctions as much, perhaps, as any other. On the other hand, the
objectivism of his point of view brought a new element into my too
concentrated habit of thought. I deemed myself already too old, being
about thirty years of age, to conquer the difficulties of the higher
mathematics, and of the several sciences in which these play so
important a part. But I had had a bird's-eye view of this wonderful
region of the natural sciences, and this, I think, never passed quite
out of my mind. I used to talk about the books with Parker, who read
everything worth reading. They had not greatly appealed to him. I also,
at this time, read Hegel's "Aesthetik," and endeavored to read his
"Logik," which I borrowed from Parker, and which he pronounced "so
crabbed as to be scarcely worth enucleating."

I cannot remember what it was which, soon after this time, led me to the
study of Spinoza. I followed this