My university education in Copenhagen had been an abstract metaphysical one; the professors of philosophy of the institution were men who, although mutually opposed to one another and supposed to be advocates of diametrically opposite standpoints, in all essentials bore the impress of the same school. They had begun their career as theologians, and had later become Hegelians, some influenced by the left flank of the Hegel school, others by the right. They had finally, together with all the rest of the world at that time, become "emancipated from Hegel," which, however, must be so interpreted as to admit of Hegel's still remaining first and last in their mental sphere. The methods of Hegel, employed now more naïvely, now in a more sophistic way, were preached from a _cathedra_, devoted to the worship of the absolute, the subjective-objective; his works were cited, his few witticisms repeated, and a wearisome, never-ending controversy against his supposed errors was carried on, from which we students gathered that they were almost all founded on his undervaluation of the real, especially in his faulty discernment of the natural sciences. We were taught, however, to consider his errors more precious than the truths of other thinkers, since truth could only be attained, as was shown by the example of our worthy professors, by creeping through the loop-hole of some error of Hegel. The University of Copenhagen, notwithstanding its otherwise by no means too friendly sentiments towards Germany, held it as an incontestable fact that modern philosophy was a German, as ancient philosophy had been a Grecian science. The existence of English empiricism and of French positivism was not recognized at the university; of English philosophy, in especial, we only heard as of a system that had long since been overthrown, and whose death-blow had been dealt to it by Kant. It had only been possible for me, by a vigorous effort of the will, to tear myself free, as best I could, from the bonds of the school prevailing in Denmark, and at the period when I met Stuart Mill I was still wavering between the speculative and the positive tendency. I made no secret to Mill of my state of uncertainty. "So, then, you are very familiar with Hegel," said he. "Do you understand German?" "To be sure I do; I read it almost as readily as I do my mother-tongue." "I do not understand the German language," he said, in reply, "and have never read a line of German literature in the original. In fact, I know so little German that when I have been in Germany, I have had difficulty in finding my way at railroad stations and elsewhere." "Have you made the acquaintance of the German philosophers through translations?" "Kant I have read in a translation, of Hegel not a syllable either in a translation or in the original. I know him only through reviews and refutations, best of all through a concise presentation of his views by the only Hegelian in England,--Stirling."