Chapter 10

I had an even deeper perception of my initiation when I went back from Hegel to Spinoza and, filled with awe and enthusiasm, read the _Ethica_ for the first time. Here I stood at the source of modern pantheistic Philosophy. Here Philosophy was even more distinctly Religion, since it took Religion's place. Though the method applied was very artificial, purely mathematical, at least Philosophy had here the attraction of a more original type of mind, the effect being much the same as that produced by primitive painting, compared with a more developed stage. His very expression, _God or Nature_, had a fascinating mysticism about it. The chapter in the book which is devoted to the Natural History of passions, surprised and enriched one by its simple, but profound, explanation of the conditions of the human soul. And although his fight against Superstition's views of life is conducted with a keenness that scouts discussion, whereas in modern Philosophy the contention is merely implied, it seemed as though his thoughts travelled along less stormy paths.

In Hegel, it had been exclusively the comprehensiveness of the thoughts and the mode of the thought's procedure that held my attention. With Spinoza it was different. It was his personality that attracted, the great man in him, one of the greatest that History has known. With him a new type had made its entrance into the world's History; he was the calm thinker, looking down from above on this earthly life, reminding one, by the purity and strength of his character, of Jesus, but a contrast to Jesus, inasmuch as he was a worshipper of Nature and Necessity, and a Pantheist. His teaching was the basis of the faith of the new age. He was a Saint and a Heathen, seditious and pious, at the same time.

XVI.

Still, while I was in this way making a purely mental endeavour to penetrate into as many intellectual domains as I could, and to become master of one subject after another, I was very far from being at peace with regard to my intellectual acquisitions, or from feeling myself in incontestable possession of them. While I was satisfying my desire for insight or knowledge and, by glimpses, felt my supremest happiness in the delight of comprehension, an ever more violent struggle was going on in my emotions.

As my being grew and developed within me and I slowly emerged from the double state of which I had been conscious, in other words, the more I became one and individual and strove to be honest and true, the less I felt myself to be a mere individual, the more I realised that I was bound up with humanity, one link in the chain, one organ belonging to the Universe. The philosophical Pantheism I was absorbed by, itself worked counter to the idea of individualism inherent in me, taught me and presented to me the union of all beings in Nature the All-Divine. But it was not from Pantheism that the crisis of my spiritual life proceeded; it was from the fountains of emotion which now shot up and filled my soul with their steady flow. A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

This gradually absorbed me till I could hardly bear the thought of the suffering, the poor, the oppressed, the victims of Injustice. I always saw them in my mind's eye, and it seemed to be my duty to work for them, and to be disgraceful of me to enjoy the good things of life while so many were being starved and tortured. Often as I walked along the streets at night I brooded over these ideas till I knew nothing of what was passing around me, but only felt how all the forces of my brain drew me towards those who suffered.

There were warm-hearted and benevolent men among my near relatives. The man whom my mother's younger sister had married had his heart in the right place, so much indeed that he no sooner saw or heard of distress than his hand was in his pocket, although he had little from which to give. My father's brother was a genuinely philanthropic man, who founded one beneficent institution or society after the other, had an unusual power of inducing his well-to-do fellow-townsmen to carry his schemes through, and in the elaboration of them showed a perception and practical sense that almost amounted to genius; this was the more surprising since his intelligence was not otherwise remarkable for its keenness and his reasoning methods were confused. But what I felt was quite different. My feelings were not so easily roused as those of the first-mentioned; I was not so good-natured or so quick to act as he. Neither did they resemble those of my other uncle, who merely represented compassion for those unfortunately situated, but was without the least vestige of rebellious feeling against the conditions or the people responsible for the misery; my uncle was always content with life as it was, saw the hand of a loving Providence everywhere and was fully and firmly convinced that he himself was led and helped by this same Providence, which specially watched over the launching of his projects for the welfare of mankind. No, my feeling was of quite another kind. Nothing was farther removed from me than this sometimes quite childish optimism. It was not enough for me to advertise the sufferings of a few individuals and, when possible, alleviate them; I sought the causes of them in brutality and injustice. Neither could I recognise the finger of a Universal Ruler in a confusion of coincidences, conversations, newspaper articles, and advice by prudent men, the outcome of all which was the founding of a society for seamstresses or the erection of a hospital to counteract the misery that the Controlling Power had Itself occasioned. I was a child no longer, and in that sense never had been childish. But my heart bled none the less with sympathy for society's unfortunates. I did not as yet perceive the necessity of that selfishness which is self-assertion, and I felt oppressed and tormented by all that I, in my comparatively advantageous position as a non-proletarian, enjoyed, while many others did not.

Then another mood, with other promptings, asserted itself. I felt an impulse to step forward as a preacher to the world around me, to the thoughtless and the hardhearted. Under the influence of strong emotion I wrote an edifying discourse, _The Profitable Fear_. I began to regard it as my duty, so soon as I was fitted for it, to go out into the town and preach at every street-corner, regardless of whether a lay preacher, like myself, should encounter indifference or harvest scorn.

This course attracted me because it presented itself to me under the guise of the most difficult thing, and, with the perversity of youth, I thought difficulty the only criterion of duty. I only needed to hit upon something that seemed to me to be the right thing and then say to myself: "You dare not do it!" for all the youthful strength and daring that was in me, all my deeper feelings of honour and of pride, all my love of grappling with the apparently insurmountable to unite, and in face of this _You dare not_, satisfy myself that I did dare.

As provisionally, self-abnegation, humility, and asceticism seemed to me to be the most difficult things, for a time my whole spiritual life was concentrated into an endeavour to attain them. Just at this time--I was nineteen--my family was in a rather difficult pecuniary position, and I, quite a poor student, was cast upon my own resources. I had consequently not much of this world's goods to renounce. From a comfortable residence in Crown Prince's Street, my parents had moved to a more modest flat in the exceedingly unaristocratic Salmon Street, where I had an attic of limited dimensions with outlook over roofs by day and a view of the stars by night. Quiet the nights were not, inasmuch as the neighbouring houses re-echoed with screams and shrieks from poor women, whom their late-returning husbands or lovers thrashed in their cups. But never had I felt myself so raised, so exhilarated, so blissfully happy, as in that room. My days slipped by in ecstasy; I felt myself consecrated a combatant in the service of the Highest. I used to test my body, in order to get it wholly under my control, ate as little as possible, slept as little as possible, lay many a night outside my bed on the bare floor, gradually to make myself as hardy as I required to be. I tried to crush the youthful sensuality that was awakening in me, and by degrees acquired complete mastery over myself, so that I could be what I wished to be, a strong and willing instrument in the fight for the victory of Truth. And I plunged afresh into study with a passion and a delight that prevented my perceiving any lack, but month after month carried me along, increasing in knowledge and in mental power, growing from day to day.

XVII.

This frame of mind, however, was crossed by another. The religious transformation in my mind could not remain clear and unmuddied, placed as I was in a society furrowed through and through by different religious currents, issued as I was from the European races that for thousands of years had been ploughed by religious ideas. All the atavism, all the spectral repetition of the thoughts and ideas of the past that can lie dormant in the mind of the individual, leaped to the reinforcement of the harrowing religious impressions which came to me from without.

It was not the attitude of my friends that impressed me. All my more intimate friends were orthodox Christians, but the attempts which various ones, amongst them Julius Lange, and Jens Paludan-Müller, had made to convert me had glanced off from my much more advanced thought without making any impression. I was made of much harder metal than they, and their attempts to alter my way of thinking did not penetrate beyond my hide. To set my mind in vibration, there was needed a brain that I felt superior to my own; and I did not find it in them. I found it in the philosophical and religious writings of Sören Kierkegaard, in such works, for instance, as _Sickness unto Death_.

The struggle within me began, faintly, as I approached my nineteenth year. My point of departure was this: one thing seemed to me requisite, to live in and for _The Idea_, as the expression for the highest at that time was. All that rose up inimical to _The Idea_ or Ideal merited to be lashed with scorn or felled with indignation. And one day I penned this outburst: "Heine wept over _Don Quixote_. Yes, he was right. I could weep tears of blood when I think of the book." But the first thing needed was to acquire a clear conception of what must be understood by the Ideal. Heiberg had regarded the uneducated as those devoid of ideals. But I was quite sure myself that education afforded no criterion. And I could find no other criterion of devotion to the Ideal than a willingness to make sacrifices. If, I said, I prove myself less self-sacrificing than any one of the wretches I am fighting, I shall myself incur well-merited scorn. But if self-sacrifice were the criterion, then Jesus, according to the teachings of tradition, was the Ideal, for who as self-sacrificing as He?

This was an inclined plane leading to the Christian spiritual life, and a year later, when I was nearly twenty, I had proceeded so far on this plane that I felt myself in all essentials in agreement with the Christian mode of feeling, inasmuch as my life was ascetic, and my searching, striving, incessantly working mind, not only found repose, but rapture, in prayer, and was elated and fired at the idea of being protected and helped by "God."

But just as I was about to complete my twentieth year, the storm broke out over again, and during the whole of the ensuing six months raged with unintermittent violence. Was I, at this stage of my development, a Christian or not? And if not, was it my duty to become a Christian?

The first thought that arose was this: It is a great effort, a constant effort, sometimes a minutely recurring effort, to attain moral mastery over one's self, and though this certainly need not bring with it a feeling of self-satisfaction, much less _ought_ to do so, it does bring with it a recognition of the value of this self-mastery. How strange, then, that Christianity, which commands its attainment, at the same time declares it to be a matter of indifference to the revealed God whether a man has lived morally or not, since Faith or lack of Faith is the one condition upon which so-called Salvation depends!

The next thought was this: It is only in the writings of Kierkegaard, in his teachings concerning paradox, that Christianity appears so definite that it cannot be confused with any other spiritual trend whatever. But when one has to make one's choice between Pantheism and Christianity, then the question arises, Are Kierkegaard's teachings really historic Christianity, and not rather a rational adaptation? And this question must be answered in the negative, since it is possible to assimilate it without touching upon the question of the revelation of the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, to the Voice from the clouds, and the whole string of miracles and dogmas.

The next thought again was this: Pantheism does not place any one unconditional goal in front of man. The unbeliever passes his life interested in the many aims that man, as man, has. The Pantheist will therefore have difficulty in living a perfect ethical life. There are many cases in which, by deviating from the strictly ethic code, you do not harm anyone, you only injure your own soul. The Non-Believer will in this case only hardly, for the sake of impersonal Truth, make up his mind to the step which the God-fearing man will take actuated by his passionate fear of offending God.

Thus was I tossed backwards and forwards in my reflections.

XVIII.

What I dreaded most was that if I reached a recognition of the truth, a lack of courage would prevent me decisively making it my own. Courage was needed, as much to undertake the burdens entailed by being a Christian as to undertake those entailed by being a Pantheist. When thinking of Christianity, I drew a sharp distinction between the cowardice that shrunk from renunciation and the doubt that placed under discussion the very question as to whether renunciation were duty. And it was clear to me that, on the road which led to Christianity, doubt must be overcome before cowardice--not the contrary, as Kierkegaard maintains in his _For Self-Examination_, where he says that none of the martyrs doubted.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both. I concluded therefrom that I had no consciousness of sin, and found this idea confirmed when I looked into my own heart. For however violently at this period I reproached myself and condemned my failings, they were always in my eyes weaknesses that ought to be combatted, or defects that could be remedied, never sins that necessitated forgiveness, and for the obtaining of this forgiveness, a Saviour. That God had died for me as my Saviour,--I could not understand what it meant; it was an idea that conveyed nothing to me.

And I wondered whether the inhabitants of another planet would be able to understand how on the Earth that which was contrary to all reason was considered the highest truth.

XIX.

With Pantheism likewise I was on my guard against its being lack of courage, rather than a conviction of its untruth, which held me back from embracing it. I thought it a true postulate that everything seemed permeated and sustained by a Reason that had not human aims in front of it and did not work by human means, a Divine Reason. Nature could only be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements. The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at heart a worshipper of Nature.

But this same Nature was indifferent to the weal or woe of humans. It obeyed its own laws regardless of whether men were lost thereby; it seemed cruel in its callousness; it took care that the species should be preserved, but the individual was nothing to it.

Now, like all other European children, I had been brought up in the theory of personal immortality, a theory which, amongst other things, is one way of expressing the immense importance, the eternal importance, which is attributed to each individual. The stronger the feeling of his own _ego_ that the individual has, the more eagerly he necessarily clings to the belief that he cannot be annihilated. But to none could the belief be more precious than to a youth who felt his life pulsate within, as if he had twenty lives in himself and twenty more to live. It was impossible to me to realise that I could die, and one evening, about a year later, I astonished my master, Professor Bröchner, by confessing as much. "Indeed," said Bröchner, "are you speaking seriously? You cannot realise that you will have to die one day? How young! You are very different from me, who always have death before my eyes."

But although my vitality was so strong that I could not imagine my own death, I knew well enough that my terrestrial life, like all other men's, would come to an end. But I felt all the more strongly that it was impossible everything could be at an end then; death could not be a termination; it could only, as the religions preached and as eighteenth-century Deism taught, be a moment of transition to a new and fuller existence. In reward and punishment after death I could not believe; those were mediaeval conceptions that I had long outgrown. But the dream of immortality I could not let go. And I endeavoured to hold it fast by virtue of the doctrine of the impossibility of anything disappearing. The quantity of matter always remained the same; energy survived every transformation.

Still, I realised that this could not satisfy one, as far as the form which we term individuality was concerned. What satisfaction was it to Alexander that his dust should stop a bung-hole? or to Shakespeare that Romeo and Juliet were acted in Chicago? So I took refuge in parallels and images. Who could tell whether the soul, which on earth had been blind to the nature of the other life, did not, in death, undergo the operation which opened its eyes? Who could tell whether death were not, as Sibbern had suggested, to be compared with a birth? Just as the unborn life in its mother's womb would, if it were conscious, believe that the revolution of birth meant annihilation, whereas it was for the first time awakening to a new and infinitely richer life, so it was perhaps for the soul in the dreaded moment of death....

But when I placed before my master these comparisons and the hopes I built upon them, they were swept away as meaningless; he pointed out simply that nothing went to prove a continuation of personality after death, while on the contrary everything argued against it,--and to this I could not refuse my assent.

Then I understood that in what I called Pantheism, the immortality of the individual had no place. And a slow, internal struggle commenced for renunciation of the importance and value of the individual. I had many a conversation on this point with my teacher, a man tired of life and thoroughly resigned.

He always maintained that the desire of the individual for a continuation of personality was nothing but the outcome of vanity. He would very often put the question in a comical light. He related the following anecdote: In summer evenings he used to go for a walk along the Philosopher's Avenue (now West Rampart Street). Here he had frequently met, sitting on their benches, four or five old gentlemen who took their evening ramble at the same time; by degrees they made each other's acquaintance and got into conversation with one another. It turned out that the old gentlemen were candle-makers who had retired from business and now had considerable difficulty in passing their time away. In reality they were always bored, and they yawned incessantly. These men had one theme only, to which they always recurred with enthusiasm--their hope in personal immortality for all eternity. And it amused Bröchner that they, who in this life did not know how to kill so much as one Sunday evening, should be so passionately anxious to have a whole eternity to fill up. His pupil then caught a glimpse himself of the grotesqueness of wishing to endure for millions of centuries, which time even then was nothing in comparison with eternity.

XX.

But in spite of it all, it was a hard saying, that in the pantheistic view of life the absorption of the individual into the great whole took the place of the continued personal existence which was desired by the _ego_. But what frightened me even more was that the divine All was not to be moved or diverted by prayer. But pray I had to. From my earliest childhood I had been accustomed, in anxiety or necessity, to turn my thoughts towards a Higher Power, first forming my needs and wishes into words, and then later, without words, concentrating myself in worship. It was a need inherited from many hundreds of generations of forefathers, this need of invoking help and comfort. Nomads of the plains, Bedouins of the desert, ironclad warriors, pious priests, roving sailors, travelling merchants, the citizen of the town and the peasant in the country, all had prayed for centuries, and from the very dawn of time; the women, the hundreds and hundreds of women from whom I was descended, had centred all their being in prayer. It was terrible, never to be able to pray again.... Never to be able to fold one's hands, never to raise one's eyes above, but to live, shut in overhead, alone in the universe!

If there were no eye in Heaven that watched over the individual, no ear that understood his plaint, no hand that protected him in danger, then he was placed, as it were, on a desolate steppe where the wolves were howling.

And in alarm I tried once more the path towards religious quietude that I had recently deemed impracticable,--until the fight within me calmed again, and in renunciation I forced my emotion to bow to what my reason had acknowledged as the Truth.

ADOLESCENCE

Julius Lange--A New Master--Inadaption to the Law--The University Prize Competition--An Interview with the Judges--Meeting of Scandinavian Students--The Paludan-Müllers--Björnstjerne Björnson--Magdalene Thoresen--The Gold Medal--The Death of King Frederik VII--The Political Situation--My Master of Arts Examination--War--_Admissus cum laude praecipua_--Academical Attention--Lecturing--Music--Nature--A Walking Tour--In Print--Philosophical Life in Denmark--Death of Ludwig David--Stockholm.

I.