PROFESSOR AT BONN 159 



position has improved since Prof. Budge went to Greifswald. 

 I am now the only official representative of Physiology, and 

 the Ministry can no longer come down on me for comparative 

 and microscopic anatomy, for which I might have been held 

 responsible. For if I lecture on human anatomy in the winter, 

 and take physiology as my principal subject in the summer, 

 my time is full, and no one can reasonably expect more 

 of me/ 



He then supplements these few lines, on December 31, by 

 a long letter, in reply to one received from his father with 

 the news that he had retired from his post at the Gymnasium : 



1 1 am delighted at what you write about your present life : 

 I think you will be more and more interested in philosophy, 

 the more you give yourself up to it. It seems to me a favour- 

 able moment for voices of the old school of Kant and the 

 elder Fichte to obtain a hearing once more. The philosophical 

 vapouring and consequent hysteria of the " nature-systems " of 

 Hegel and Schelling seem to have exploded, and people are 

 beginning to interest themselves in philosophy again. I have 

 only read a little of the Anthropologie of the younger Fichte ; 

 I found much that was interesting, but as a whole the book 

 gave me the impression of a series of plausible but unfounded 

 hypotheses, and I laid it aside, as I saw that one would have 

 to discover his main argument from his other writings. The 

 younger Fichte, indeed, appears to me not to be free from the 

 reproach which has brought philosophy into disrepute, thanks 

 to Hegel and Schelling. He introduces a number of matters 

 into his discussion, which he thinks he is obliged to talk about, 

 though they do not really belong to philosophy at all, but either 

 come into the scope of experimental science, or are matters of 

 purely religious faith.* Philosophy finds its great significance 

 among the sciences as the theory of the source and functions 

 of knowledge, in the sense in which Kant, and, so far as 

 I have understood him, the elder Fichte, took it. Hegel, how- 

 ever, wanted it to replace all the other sciences, and to find 

 out by its means what is perhaps denied to man, by which he 

 diverted philosophy from its proper scope, and gave it tasks 

 it can never accomplish. The majority of educated men at 

 first believed in him, and then rejected philosophy altogether, 

 seeing that nothing came of it. The popularity of Schopen- 





