Nor had any special subject the power to fix him. Had he
been in France, what Sainte-Beuve calls the French "_imagination de
detail_" would probably have attracted his pliant, responsive nature,
and he would have found happy occupation in some one of the innumerable
departments of research on which the French have been patiently spending
their analytical gift since that general widening of horizons which
accompanied and gave value to the Romantic movement. But instead he was
at Berlin, in the center of that speculative ferment which followed the
death of Hegel and the break-up of the Hegelian idea into a number of
different and conflicting sections of philosophical opinion. He was
under the spell of German synthesis, of that traditional, involuntary
effort which the German mind makes, generation after generation, to find
the unity of experience, to range its accumulations from life and
thought under a more and more perfect, a more and more exhaustive,
formula. Not this study or that study, not this detail or that, but the
whole of things, the sum of Knowledge, the Infinite, the Absolute, alone
had value or reality. In his own words: "There is no repose for the mind
except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul
except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy
to fix my attention.
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