Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/70

52 abstract one-sidedness in which they decompose the medium combine to a third body which is the totality and the neutrality of the opposites, the dynamical process in its highest perfection."

When a young man of seventeen or eighteen years of age is capable of freeing himself from the trammels of such a chimera termed philosophy, which had taken such a deep hold of a whole nation as to cause to flock to the university where it was taught the selected youth of the whole country, you may give him credit for great power of mind and for great independence of judgment. Do not forget that this development of the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel was a consequence of the latter part of the philosophy of Kant. Kant's philosophy was great as long as it was based on the exact sciences, upon physics, and upon mathematics, but when he left that basis and went into the speculative philosophy he gradually went away from that basis which had made his early philosophy so sound and so full of meaning for the perfection of the human understanding. On the other hand, when you come to a further development of the same philosophy, namely, that of Fichte, there the speculative part vanishes entirely into insignificance, because that which Fichte taught was not such kind of nonsense as that which I have read to you, but it was a kind of moral philosophy which spoke to the youth of Germany, and taught them this one great proposition, which every one of them ought to feel, and which is the first condition of self-consciousness in man, namely, "I am I;" this was the great teaching of Fichte, by which he brought home to men their own value and their own powers, which cannot be said was the result of the other philosophy from which I have quoted.

In 1822 Liebig, having emancipated himself from this kind of teaching, took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Erlangen, when he was nineteen years old. In the autumn of that year he returned to Darmstadt; his researches and endeavors then became known, and he attracted the attention of the Grand-duke Ludwig I., of Hesse-Darmstadt, who conferred upon him a state stipend, to enable him to continue his studies at Paris. To Paris, therefore, he went. Now let us for a moment consider what was then the condition of chemistry at Paris. Lavoisier, the great reformer, who. had established what was then called the antiphlogistic chemistry, had thirty years before died on the scaffold; Guyton de Morveau, Fourcroy, and Berthollet, whom the first Napoleon called the plus brave des Français, because he gave him chlorate of potassium, by which he hoped to overcome the want of nitre for his gunpowder; the great Société d'Arcueil, which worked through the whole of the war-times zealously at science, and published its memoirs—all these men had passed away. But there remained their disciples in the persons of Proust, Chevreul, Vauquelin, Gay-Lussac, Thénard, and Dulong. Chevreul is the only one of these celebrated men who now lives, and he has lately published, in the