Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/569

Rh thoroughness, rather than of precocity of genius. Method and persistency were the characteristics of the youthful scholar, as they were of the mature metaphysician. At the University of Tübingen, to which he proceeded in 1788, he was a fellow-student with Schelling—a kindred spirit, who presented, too, some very decided points of contrast. For a time they lived together in the same room; and the intimacy thus commenced exercised from first to last marked influence, partly through sympathy and partly through rivalry, on the destinies of these two great thinkers. In later life they had their differences. "They stood aloof, the scars remaining;" and so wide, indeed, was the breach that, after Hegel's death, Schelling was summoned to Berlin to preach down the doctrines of his early friend, which were supposed to have become too dominant and exclusive—an enterprise which he attempted without much success. But in those early days at Tübingen, in the springtime of their youth, the identity of their aspirations (it was the era of the French Revolution, when politics were more engrossing even than philosophy) seems to have knit them together, as it afterwards did at Jena, in the closest intellectual fellowship. After completing his university course, Hegel accepted the office of tutor in a family in Switzerland, which he exchanged, some years afterwards, for a more agreeable appointment of the same kind at Frankfort. On the death of his father in 1799, the small patrimony which he