Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/165

This page needs to be proofread.
104
ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

was erelong compelled to abandon this, through loss of his sight. In spite of his blindness, however, he has kept up the most copious production and publication.[1] In contrast to Hartmann, who leads the quiet life of a man of letters well-to-do, he has tasted no little of the bitterness of the human lot. For many years he won much reputation as a privat-docent at the University of Berlin; but in 1877 he was dismissed from this office on account of his persistent and galling attacks on some of the scientific and philosophical performances of certain of his colleagues, particularly Helmholtz, and since then he has remained in the comparative quiet of private life. Lange, born near Solingen, in 1828, made his university course chiefly at Bonn, where his principal interest seemed to be in philology and pedagogics. He then passed some years in practical life, partly as bookseller, partly as secretary of the Duisburg chamber of commerce. Later, he was made professor of philosophy at Zurich, where, in his case too, disease left its lasting marks in the effects of a surgical operation that nearly cost him his life. In 1872, he was called from Zurich to Marburg, but died there, in 1875, after prolonged sufferings, in the bloom of his intellectual powers, to the unceasing regret of that large body of his younger

  1. His works already comprise no less than twenty octavo volumes, in the various departments of metaphysics, economics, sociology, mathematics, and criticism.