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II.
The Parents of Princess Elizabeth.

Table of Contents

We have caused a long series of pictures from life to pass before us, and yet we have learnt to know but a small proportion of the distinguished men and women who belonged to the House of Wied. Prince Herman, who was born in 1814, was also one of the most distinguished men of his time. After he had finished his studies in Göttingen, travelled in Germany and France, and served for some time in a regiment of Guards in Berlin, he undertook the management of his numerous estates. Of noble and aristocratic appearance, he was endowed with the finest qualities of the heart and was distinguished by his modesty, which virtue was ever to be found in the House of Wied. He was a man of deep learning and culture, and of great intellectual power. Being of a philosophic turn of mind which was of a speculative cast, the highest object of his life was a ceaseless endeavour to attain to a knowledge of the important questions which concern the physical and spiritual condition of man. His mind was constantly fixed on the mysterious problems of human nature. The results of his reflections are enshrined in a work which was anonymously published in 1859 and bore the title “The Unconscious Life of the Soul and the Manifestations of God.” Many experiences which took place in his own house or with which he had come in contact had convinced him of the reality and the efficiency of the superhuman elements in man. He did not doubt the fact of the magnetic powers of feeling, somnambulism, electric affinities, clairvoyance, &c. In order to elucidate these facts, the Prince sought to establish a theory which he himself only termed an hypothesis; that the essential conditions of human nature should be a body, soul, and spirit; the soul a personal and conscious principle, whilst the creative spirit is of God, ever present and working within man—an unconscious principle. The Prince named these “the three conditions of human nature,” and this theory was the foundation of his views of life. His work, therefore, has to do with the unconscious life of the soul. The spirit manifests itself, the soul is acted upon by the spirit. What the spirit creates awakes the consciousness in the soul. The unconscious life of the soul is, therefore, a revelation of godly power. What Mesmer denominated magnetic power is, according to the Prince, the power of God. It is a creative and life-giving power, which can heal the infirmities of the human body, restore organic life, and elevate spiritual life. Consequently the Prince regarded the so-called magnetic power as sacred, and magnetic healing as a religious work. We gather from this that the Prince acknowledges that these revelations are of God, but does not understand the idea in a dogmatic light. He does not regard the workings of this power as a miracle in the ordinary sense of the word, but as natural occurrences; still, he believes with Hamlet that nature possesses more and higher powers “than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

As, according to the fundamental idea of his philosophy with regard to the threefold nature of man, soul and spirit may indeed act together, but at the same time they exist separate from one another, and, being by no means identical, the Prince could not assent to the dicta of the so-called Philosophers of Identity (Identitats Philosophen). The latter assert the identity of nature and spirit; they look upon the human mind as being evolved from the divine, and upon the soul as being evolved from the mind; he therefore rejected the Pantheistic as well as the philosophical systems of Schelling and Hegel, and classed himself with those philosophers whom Schelling called Reflections menschen, i.e., thinkers who, according to the ordinary view, retain the contrast between the inner and the outer worlds, between internal and external phenomena, between perceptions and things, thinking and being, but who consider any knowledge going beyond this, and endeavouring to overcome this contrast by comprehending the unity of all things, to be impossible. His views were similar to those of Kant. Prince Herman therefore felt himself specially attracted towards the Königsberg philosopher, who in his critical works had so accurately and carefully distinguished the intellectual or spiritual world from the sensuous, the essence of things or the things-in-themselves from the phenomena. Only with respect to the free will of man he felt unable to follow the teaching of Kant, who, while declaring the essence of man as well as of things in general to lie beyond the range of knowledge, asserted the same with regard to that moral freedom which (as the Prince thought) should reveal itself to us by means of moral self-examination and become practically intelligible. Here Prince Herman thought he perceived a contradiction which he set himself to remove. With that object he wrote and published an essay entitled “The Results of an Examination of Kant’s Doctrine of Free Will.” To refute the objections he encountered, he defended his point of view in a pamphlet published shortly before his death under the title “Replik und Duplik.” It had been his endeavour to give an explanation of human free will, and the objection had been made that his doctrine was “Determinism.” That doctrine, briefly expressed, was as follows. Free will, properly understood, consists in the liberty of will or choice, that is, in the power of choosing one among several possibilities or motives of action, which presupposes the power of reflection, of consideration, or of doubt. If man were omniscient, he would not have to reflect or to consider. Divine omniscience excludes free will, whereas human ignorance includes free will. Because the greater part of the conditions under which we act remains hidden to us, we act without knowing our dependence, and imagine a limited number of possibilities from among which we may choose. Consequently we cannot help imagining ourselves to be free, and this necessary imagination, the Prince thinks, is really freedom itself. The choice only is free, not the effect. According to the Prince’s view, therefore, there are no free causes. The notion of a free cause appears to him as an empty phantom—“a cloud, which Polonius at one time takes for a camel, at another for a weasel, and which yet remains nothing but vapour.”

With his usual modesty, Prince Herman never represents his views as infallible, but regards them as material for the solution of the difficult problems of the connection of man to the spiritual world. He regarded opinions which differed from his own with the toleration of a thoughtful man who honours all intellectual labour. In his personal principles he was truly German. That the unity of Germany could only be brought about by means of Prussia was his firm conviction. He hoped that the German Princes would be brought to renounce their sovereignty of their own free will, for the good of their country. He did not doubt that sooner or later circumstances would induce them to do so. In the Upper House Prince Herman represented Liberal opinions, but he soon retired from public life in order to live entirely for his family and his philosophic labours. He studied the historic works of Mommsen, Häusser, and Ranke with peculiar interest. Besides which he had a deep feeling for art, and was himself a painter of no mean merit. In consequence of a bath which he had imprudently taken at the camp of Kilish in 1835 the Prince contracted an illness which was a hindrance to him for the rest of his life, and was the cause of his early death.

In 1842 Prince Herman married the youthful Princess Marie of Nassau. She was eminently fitted to fulfil the duties which devolved upon her in her position of princess, wife, and mother. Of dignified appearance, she is distinguished by her personal beauty and her truly noble mind. She is a woman of great power of will, of clear judgment, wonderful devotion, and untiring energy; very severe in what she demands of herself, whilst her kindness and indulgence towards all with whom she comes in contact are unbounded. Having been much tried herself by sorrow and suffering, the Princess feels a true sympathy for the sufferings of others. To minister to the wants of the sick and poor, and to comfort them with her personal sympathy, is her greatest happiness. In the homes of the poor at Neuwied she is regarded as a beneficent angel, and a blessing enters with her. She possesses the happy gift of winning the love and sympathy of all classes of people. The Princess is beloved and honoured by all, and her wonderful charm delights all who approach her.