Every day, every hour, this young man acquired something from ancient or from modern lore; at twenty-four he was versed in a learning beyond that of many a lifelong scholar. His studies, within a year of the period at which we introduce him to the reader, had taken a form different from any he had before pursued; the old disciples of a gorgeous mythology being neglected for the mystical and alluring spiritualism of the exponents of modern German philosophy. The English philosophy is entirely destructive of the grand, the lofty, the divine! It lowers and debases by its precepts, and chills by its explanations. The French, on the other hand, attempts no explanations; but the system is an elaborate sneer at all that is good, and true, and high, and noble. The aim of the German "is at least the nobler one, and elevates, not dwarfs, the souls of men." "There is a Godlike within us that feels itself akin to the God; and if we are told that both the 'Godlike and the God are dreams,' we can but answer that so to dream is better than to wake and find ourselves nothing!"
Who among us--but worms of the dust, low things, fit only for the mire in which they wallow--but has at one time or another demanded initiation into the secret order of the "searchers after truth?" Who among us but, unsatisfied with the knowledge that may be achieved, grasps wildly after heaven's thunderbolts, and would embrace the unattainable, feeling, as we so terribly do, the restlessness and the might of the Deity in our burning veins? Who among us but has tried to look deep into the future, and read the fate, not of the next year or moment, but of the undying spirit in that other world, of which we dream so much, and know so little?
And who among us who has had the heroism honestly to make the attempt, and to pursue to their sequences the terrible thoughts to which such reflection gives rise, but has gone down headlong to the pit? If no _actual_ phantoms haunt the waking dreams of such unsuccessful neophytes, yet a more terrible thing is that accursed skepticism--that coldness that does not brook to be questioned, and that cannot be understood--that fills his soul. It does not come over his hours of mirth, when the wine-cup passes and the jest goes round; but, like the fabled fiend of the romancers, comes only over the lost one's soul, when his intellect would aspire and his genius dare. Comes it, with its eternal sneer, that sees nothing so high that it does not make it appear utterly despicable! When his genius would dare, comes it with its evil eyes, and he loses faith in his genius and doubts his power; loses faith when he knows that faith only can bear him through life's tempests; doubts while he feels doubt to be the unpardonable sin.[1]