ical Society, and
likewise that of Professor Drobisch. In these societies every member,
when his turn came, had to write an essay and defend it against the
professor and the other members of the society. All this was very
helpful, but it was not till I had heard a course of lectures on the
History of Philosophy, by Professor Niedner, that my interest in
Philosophy became strong and healthy. While Weisse was a leading
Hegelian philosopher, and Drobisch represented the opposite philosophy
of Herbart, Niedner was purely historical, and this appealed most to
my taste. Still, my philosophical studies remained very disjointed. At
last I was admitted to Lotze's Philosophical Society also, and here we
chiefly read and discussed Kant's _Kritik_. Lotze was then quite a
young man, undecided as yet himself between physical science and pure
philosophy.

Weisse was certainly the most stirring lecturer, but his delivery was
fearful. He did not read his lectures, as many professors did, but
would deliver them _extempore_. He had no command of language, and
there was a pause after almost every sentence. He was really thinking
out the problem while he was lecturing; he was constantly repeating
his sentences, and any new thought that crossed his mind would carry
him miles away from his subject. It happened sometimes in these
rhapsodies that he contradicted himself, but when I walked home with
him after his lecture to a village near Leipzig where he lived, he
would readily explain how it happened, how he meant something quite
different from what he had said, or what I had understood. In fact he
would give the whole lecture over again, only much more freely and
more intelligibly. I was fully convinced at that time that Hegel's
philosophy was the final solution of all problems; I only hesitated
about his philosophy of history as applied to the history of religion.
I could not bring myself to admit that the history of religion, nor
even the history of philosophy as we know it from Thales to Kant, was
really running side by side with his Logic, showing how the leading
concepts of the human mind, as elaborated in the Logic, had found
successive expression in the history and development of the schools of
philosophy as known to us. Weisse was strong both in his analysis of
concepts and in his knowledge of history, and though he taught Hegel
as a faithful interpreter, he always warned us against trusting too
much in the parallelism between Logic