elieve that we even had
our own hangman, but as none of my friends ever had occasion for his
services I did not inquire. The same ticket also entitled me to attend
the opera at half-price, and if it had only included tobacco and beer
gratis, it would have been the means of vast economies.

I entered myself for a course of lectures by Professor Friedrich Thiersch
on AEsthetics. He it was who had trained Heine to art, and I venture to
say that in my case the seed fell on good ground. I took in every
thought. His system agreed, on the whole, perfectly with that advanced
in after years by Taine, and marvellously well with that set forth in the
"Essays, Speculative and Suggestive," of J. A. Symonds--that is, it was
eclectic and deductive from historical periods, and not at all
"rhapsodical" or merely subjective. I bought the best works, such as
Kugler's, for guides, and studied hard, and frequented the Pinacothek and
Glyptothek, and I may say really educated myself well in the history of
art and different schools of aesthetics. My previous reading, travel,
and tastes fitted me in every way to easily master such knowledge. I
also followed Becker's course on Schelling, but my heart was not in it,
as it would have been two years before. The lectures of Professor Henry
and Gmelin and true Science had caused in me a distrust of metaphysics
and psychological systems and theories. I began to see that they were
all only very ingenious shufflings and combinations and phases of the
same old cards of Pantheism, which could be made into Theism, Pietism,
Atheism, or Materialism to suit any taste. I was advancing rapidly to
pure science, though Evolution was as yet unknown by the name, albeit the
Okenites and others with their _Natur-philosophie_ were coming closely to
it.

In fact, I think it may be truly said that, as regarded deducing man and
all things from a _prima materia_ or protoplasm by means of natural
selection and vast study of differentiation, they were exactly where
Darwin, and Wallace, and Huxley were when we began to know the latter. I
do not agree with Max Muller in his very German and very artfully
disguised and defended theory that the religious idea originated in a
vague sense of the Infinite in the minds of savages; for I believe it
began with the bogeys and nightmares of obscure terror, hunger, disease,
and death; but the Professor is quite right in declaring that Evolution
was first created or developed