Again and again while reading Hegel's works I felt carried away with
delight at the new world of thought opening out before me. And when
anything that for a long time had been incomprehensible to me, at last
after tenacious reflection became clear, I felt what I myself called "an
unspeakable bliss." Hegel's system of thought, anticipatory of
experience, his German style, overburdened with arbitrarily constructed
technical words from the year 1810, which one might think would daunt a
young student of another country and another age, only meant to me
difficulties which it was a pleasure to overcome. Sometimes it was not
Hegelianism itself that seemed the main thing. The main thing was that I
was learning to know a world-embracing mind; I was being initiated into
an attempt to comprehend the universe which was half wisdom and half
poetry; I was obtaining an insight into a method which, if
scientifically unsatisfying, and on that ground already abandoned by
investigators, was fruitful and based upon a clever, ingenuous, highly
intellectual conception of the essence of truth; I felt myself put to
school to a great intellectual leader, and in this school I learnt to
think.
I might, it is true, have received my initiation in a school built up on
more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much time,
been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly had I
been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed me in
a school in which historical sources were examined more critically, but
not less intelligently, and in which respect for individuality was
greater.
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