hought.

What I mean by a critic in this connection is not a witty and agreeable
_causeur_, like the late Jules Janin, who, taking a book for his text,
discoursed entertainingly about everything under the sun; but an
interpreter of a civilization and a representative of a school of
thought who sheds new light upon old phenomena--men like Lessing,
Matthew Arnold, and Taine. The latest candidate for admission to this
company, whose title, I think, no one who has read him will dispute, is
the Dane, Georg Brandes.

Dr. Brandes was born in Copenhagen in 1842, and is accordingly
fifty-three years of age (1895). At the age of seventeen he entered the
University of his native city, devoting himself first to jurisprudence,
and occupying himself later with philosophical and aesthetical studies.
In 1862 he gained the gold medal of the University by an essay on
"Fatalism among the Ancients," which showed a surprising brilliancy of
expression and maturity of thought; and soon after he passed his
examination for the doctorate of philosophy with the highest
distinction. It is told that the old poet Hauch, who was then Professor
of AEsthetics at the University, was so much impressed by the young
doctor's ability that he hoped to make him his successor. And toward
this end Dr. Brandes began to bend his energies. During the next five or
six years he travelled on the Continent, spending the winter of 1865 in
Stockholm, that of 1866-67 in Paris, and sojourning, moreover, for
longer or shorter periods in the principal cities of Germany. He became
a most accomplished linguist, speaking French and German almost as
fluently as his mother-tongue; and, being an acute observer as well as
an earnest student, he acquired an equipment for the position to which
he aspired which distanced all competitors. But in Denmark, as
elsewhere, cosmopolitan culture does not constitute the strongest claim
to a professorship. In his book, "The Dualism in Our Most Recent
Philosophy" (1866), Brandes took up the dangerous question of the
relation of science to religion, and treated it in a spirit which
aroused antagonism on the part of the conservative and orthodox party.

This able treatise, though it may not be positivism pure and simple,
shows a preponderating influence of Comte and his school, and its
attitude toward religion is approximately that of Herbert Spencer and
Stuart Mill. The constellation under which Brandes was born into the
world of thought was