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-Mueller, 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 Soeren 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.
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