He has, indeed, described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had " carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room " interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature "; how he served in willing captivity " the ` empirical ' and ` necessarian ' mode of thought," even though " shocked " by the dogmatism and acrid humours " of certain distinguished representatives "; 1 and how in a period of " second education " at Berlin, " mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg," he experienced " a new intellectual birth" which " was essentially the gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant and even Hegel."
Subsequently he studied in Berlin, especially under Trendelenburg, whose ethical tendencies and historical treatment of philosophy greatly attracted him.
He studied theology and philosophy under Trendelenburg at Berlin, and eventually became professor of philosophy in the new university of Strassburg.
But, under the influence of Trendelenburg's attempt to reconcile thought and being by assigning motion to both, his Wirklichkeitsphilosophie, in a similar effort after a unity of being, lands him in the contention that matter is absolute being, the support of all reality underlying all bodily and mental states.
Trendelenburg (1802-1872), a formidable opponent of Hegel, tried to surmount Kant's transcendental idealism by supposing that motion, and therefore time, space and the categories, though a priori, are common to thought and being.