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Brandes, Georg Morris Cohen, 1842-1927

"Recollections of My Childhood and Youth"

"
It was only several years after the beginning of our acquaintance that I
felt myself in essential agreement with Hans Broechner. I had been
enraptured by a study of Ludwig Feuerbach's books, for Feuerbach was the
first thinker in whose writings I found the origin of the idea of God in
the human mind satisfactorily explained. In Feuerbach, too, I found a
presentment of ideas without circumlocution and without the usual heavy
formulas of German philosophy, a conquering clarity, which had a very
salutary effect on my own way of thinking and gave me a feeling of
security. If for many years I had been feeling myself more conservative
than my friend and master, there now came a time when in many ways I
felt myself to be more liberal than he, with his mysterious life in the
eternal realm of mind of which he felt himself to be a link.

III.
I had not been studying Jurisprudence much more than a year before it
began to weigh very heavily upon me. The mere sight of the long rows of
_Schou's Ordinances_, which filled the whole of the back of my
writing-table, were a daily source of vexation. I often felt that I
should not be happy until the Ordinances were swept from my table. And
the lectures were always so dreary that they positively made me think of
suicide--and I so thirsty of life!--as a final means of escape from the
torment of them.


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