Page:Selections from the writings of Kierkegaard.djvu/16

 fields and forests of the lovely island of Zealand. In fact, he contracted considerable debts, so that his disappointed father decided to put him on an allowance of 500 rixdollars yearly — rather a handsome sum, a hundred years ago.

Naturally, little direct progress was made in his studies. But while to all appearances aimlessly dissipating his energies, he showed a pronounced love for philosophy and kindred disciplines. He lost no opportunity then offered at the University of Copenhagen to train his mind along these lines. He heard the sturdily independent Sibbern's lectures on æsthetics and enjoyed a "privatissimum" on the main issues of Schleiermacher's Dogmatics with his later enemy, the theologian Martensen, author of the celebrated "Christian Dogmatics."

But there was no steadiness in him. Periods of indifference to these studies alternated with feverish activity, and doubts of the truth of Christianity, with bursts of devotion. However, the Hebraically stern cast of mind of the externally gay student soon wearied of this rudderless existence. He sighs for an "Archimedean" point of support for his conduct of life. We find the following entry in his diary, which prophetically foreshadows some of the fundamental ideas of his later career: "... what I really need is to arrive at a clear comprehension of, not of what I am to grasp with my understanding, except insofar as this understanding is necessary for every action. The point is, to comprehend what I am called to do, to see what the Godhead really means that I shall do, to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea  ..."

This Archimedean point was soon to be furnished him. There came a succession of blows, culminating in the death of his father, whose silent disapprobation had long been weighing heavily on the conscience of the wayward son. Even more awful, perhaps, was a revelation made by the dying father to his sons, very likely touching that very "sin against the Holy Ghost" which he had committed in his boyhood and the consequence of which he now was to