5 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



abstract one-sided iiess in which they decompose the medium combine 

 to a third body which is the totality and the neutrality of the oppo- 

 sites, the dynamical process in its highest perfection." 



When a young man of seventeen or eighteen years of age is capa- 

 ble of freeing himself from the trammels of such a chimera termed 

 philosophy, which had taken such a deep hold of a whole nation as to 

 cause to flock to the university where it was taught the selected youth 

 of the whole country, you may give him credit for great power of 

 mind and for great independence of judgment. Do not forget that 

 this development of the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel was a con- 

 sequence of the latter part of the philosophy of Kant. Kant's phi- 

 losophy was great as long as it was based on the exact sciences, upon 

 physics, and upon mathematics, but when he left that basis and went 

 into the speculative philosophy he gradually went away from that 

 basis which had made his early philosophy so sound and so full of 

 meaning for the perfection of the human understanding. On the other 

 hand, when you come to a further development of the same philoso- 

 phy, namely, that of Fichte, there the speculative part vanishes en- 

 tirely into insignificance, because that which Fichte taught was not 

 such kind of nonsense as that which I have read to you, but it was a 

 kind of moral philosophy which spoke to the youth of Germany, and 

 taught them this one great proposition, which every one of them 

 ought to feel, and which is the first condition of self-consciousness in 

 man, namely, "I am I;" this was the great teaching of Fichte, by 

 which he brought home to men their own value and their own powers, 

 which cannot be said was the result of the other philosophy from 

 which I have quoted. 



In 1822 Liebig, having emancipated himself from this kind of 

 teaching, took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Erlangen, when 

 he was nineteen years old. In the autumn of that year he returned 

 to Darmstadt ; his researches and endeavors then became known, and 

 he attracted the attention of the Grand-duke Ludwig I., of Hesse- 

 Darmstadt, who conferred upon him a state stipend, to enable him to 

 continue his studies at Paris. To Paris, therefore, he went. Now let 

 us for a moment consider what was then the condition of chemistry 

 at Paris. Lavoisier, the great reformer, who. had established what 

 was then called the antiphlogistic chemistry, had thirty years before 

 died on the scaffold; Guyton de Morveau, Fourcroy, and Berthollet, 

 whom the first Napoleon called the plus brave des Frangais, because 

 he gave him chlorate of potassium, by which he hoped to overcome 

 the want of nitre for his gunpowder; the great Societe d'Arcueil, 

 which worked through the whole of the war-times zealously at science, 

 and published its memoirs all these men had passed away. But there 

 remained their disciples in the persons of Proust, Chevreul, Vauquelin, 

 Gay-Lussac, Thenard, and Dulong. Chevreul is the only one of these 

 celebrated men who now lives, and he has lately published, in the 



