And Steffens--he who stormed the heaven of German Romanticism, carried the sacred fire to Denmark, and set men's minds in such violent uproar that he was compelled to leave his country--what of him? what was he? An upright, weak character, with a brain charged with confused enthusiasms; all feeling and imitative fancy; no lucidity of thought or pregnant concision of style. It is literally impossible to read the so-called scientific writings of his later period; one runs the risk of being drowned in watery sentimentality or smothered by ennui. "When," says Julian Schmidt, "he expounded the _Naturphilosophie_ in his broken German from the professorial chair, his mathematical calculations came out wrong and his experiments failed, but his audience was carried away by his earnestness, his almost religious solemnity, his naïve, child-like enthusiasm." Naïveté was a quality that the Northerner of those days seldom lacked. In his best days, Steffens, captivated by the theories of the _Naturphilosophie_, took an innocent pleasure in tracing the attributes of the human mind in minerals, in humanising geology and botany. But the Revolution of July turned his head. Inflamed by pietism, that elderly lady who for the last thirteen years had been the object of his affections, and for whose sake he had already more than once entered the lists, he closed his literary career with a series of feeble attacks upon the young writers of post-revolutionary Germany. In this he was only following in the footsteps of his master, Schelling. Schelling, who, in marked contrast to Fichte with his clear doctrine of the Ego, dwells upon the mysterious nature of the mind, and bases not only philosophy, but also art and religion, upon the perception of genius, the so-called "intellectual intuition," displays both in his doctrine and in his want of method the arbitrariness, the lawlessness, which is the kernel of Romanticism. As early as 1802, in his _Bruno_, he used the significant expression and future catchword, "Christian philosophy," though he still maintained that, in genuine religious value, the Bible is not to be compared with the sacred books of India--a theory which even Görres champions in the early stage of his literary career. Having, like Novalis, at Tieck's instigation, made a close study of Jakob Böhme and the other mystics, Schelling began to philosophise mystically on the subject of "Nature in God," an expression appropriated by Martensen in his _Spekulative Dogmatik_. But when, shortly afterwards, a patent of nobility was conferred on him (as professor at the University of Munich), and he was made President of the Academy of Science in Catholic and clerical Bavaria, the famous "Philosophy of Revelation" (Offenbarungsphilosophie) commenced to germinate in his mind. Soon the transformation was complete; the fiery enthusiast had become a courtier, the prophet a charlatan. With his mysteries, his announcements of a marvellous science, "which