exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living men
of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard
(1813-1855) a new force of criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting
out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually developed, always on
quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant of conventional
Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, somewhat in that
of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper recalling
now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of his
teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen,
who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen's Brand, of which
the hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard. [1878] Ibsen, though
his Brand was counted to him for righteousness by the Churches,
showed himself a thorough-going naturalist in all his later work;
Björnson was an active freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg
Brandes, early avowed himself to the same effect; and his brother,
the dramatist, Edward Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in
1871 despite his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian
nor the Jewish God. Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and
Sweden seem to be of the same cast of thought.
Section 4.--The Natural Sciences