The German Genius

aspects of scholarship. More technically, it referred to the “scrupulous precision” with which sources—archives, manuscripts—were to be treated. 23
    The “recension” of a text epitomized the new approach. In this process, scholars compared different versions of a source, each of which had to be accurately dated, and all errors eliminated. F. A. Wolf did this most famously in Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795, concluding (see Chapter 3) that, in effect, there was no such person as Homer. In fact, many of Wolf’s specific arguments were exploded by his own students—and fairly quickly at that. But, in a sense, that was not the point. The book—at a stroke—demonstrated the sheer power of the critical method to unearth real historical knowledge. It aroused passionate debate, debate in which Wolf played his part, but during the next two decades his methods were extended into new areas—for example, the German epics, and the biblical texts. “The Prolegomena established philology as the most exact and exalted of German sciences.” 24
    The new Prussian learning was a highly self-conscious entity and, says Nipperdey, somewhat solitary. Turner says that a feeling of intense excitement and accelerating intellectual progress permeates the letters and papers of scholars during the early nineteenth century. “Boeckh wrote repeatedly of the ‘new learning,’ Wolf of Altertumswissenschaft as ‘a new science at its birth’ and Leopold von Ranke reported with awe the ‘still unknown history of Europe’ lying before him in the Vienna archives.” 25
    In line with these changes, the “disciplinary community” began to emerge and with it the associated furniture—libraries and manuscript collections, prestigious journals and their editorships, reviews and critiques, which now became very important, as part of a scholar’s output, not least because they helped maintain rigorous methods and standards.
    Not everyone had the time or inclination for such an approach and so, before too long, and gradually, philologists began to write for each other in their journals. Thus was born the first instance of a professional literature. It was a development that did not go unnoticed by the public; philologists, for example, became known for their egotism and sheer arrogance. Some, like Karl Konrad Lachmann, were notorious for their acid reviews. 26
    That arrogance apart, however, the critical method had helped to produce a new attitude toward scholarly creativity and the process of discovery. There developed a dissatisfaction with mere erudition, so valued in the eighteenth century: there was now a growing emphasis on originality as the criterion of the value of a scholarly enterprise. One effect of this was to undermine the eighteenth-century belief that discovery “was available only to geniuses,” and instead allowed that a greater number of individuals, “with lesser gifts,” could achieve something worthwhile. This encouraged a prevailing sense of movement, an expectation of infinite advance, and marked a major transition from the eighteenth-to the nineteenth-century understanding of learning. 27 Out of all this came an idealizing of creativity and an ideology of original research.
    “Knowledge is itself a branch of human culture,” insisted Fichte. Humboldt agreed. The purpose of the universities is “to cultivate learning in the deepest and broadest sense of the word,” not for some practical or utilitarian end, but for its own sake as “preparatory material of spiritual and moral education ( Bildung ).” 28
    The fragmentation of scholarship into disparate, disconnected specialities also began in earnest in the 1830s. Scholarship was now seen as a process of accumulation , stone-by-stone. 29 “Comprehension of the entire edifice remained an ideal, but only at one metaphysical remove.” This is still more or less the attitude we have today.
    T HE G ROWTH OF THE S CIENCE S EMINAR
     
    The other major change was that, during the Vormärz (the period between 1840 and the March revolution of 1848), the philosophical faculties of the Prussian universities—which had been the poor relations in the early eighteenth century—consolidated their advance and blossomed into a position of leadership. Between 1800 and 1854, again according to Turner, the number of students enrolled in philosophy grew from 2.4 percent to 21.3 percent, and the teaching staff showed a similar rise. Philosophy, philology, and