The theatrical season now approached its end. The Theatrical Academy gave their customary stage performance. John had received no rôle in it, but undertook the task of prompter. And his career as an actor closed in the prompter's box. To this was reduced his ambition of acting Karl Moor on the stage of the Great Theatre! Did he deserve this fate? Was he worse equipped for acting than the rest? That was probably not so, but the question was never decided.
In the evening after the performance, a dinner was given to the Academy pupils. John was invited and made a speech in verse in order to make his exit seem as little like a fiasco as possible. He became intoxicated, as usual, behaved foolishly and disappeared from the scene.
The Upsala of the sixties showed signs of the end and dissolution of a period which might be called the Boströmic.[1] In what relation does the philosophic system which prevails in a given period stand to the period itself? The system seems like a collection of the thoughts of the period at a particular point of time. The philosopher does not make the period, but the period makes the philosopher. He collects all the thoughts of his period and thereby exercises an influence on it, and with the close of the period his influence ends. The Boströmic philosophy had three defects; it wished to be definitely Swedish; it came too late; and it wished to outlive its period. To attempt to construct a purely Swedish philosophy was absurd, for that meant trying to break loose from the connection with the great mother-stem which grows on the Continent and only sends out seeds towards the Northern peninsula. The attempt came too late, for time is necessary to construct a system, and before the system was constructed, the period had passed. Boström, as a philosopher, was not, as it were, shot out of a cannon. All knowledge is collecting-work, and is coloured by the personality of the collector. Boström was a branch grown out of Kant and Hegel, watered by Biberg and Grubbe, and finally producing some offshoots of his own. That was all. He seems to have derived his fundamental principle from Krause's Pantheism, which itself was an attempt to unite the philosophy of Kant and Fichte with that of Schelling and Hegel. This eclecticism had been already attempted by Grubbe. Boström first studied theology, and this seemed to have a hampering effect on his mind when he wrote about speculative theology. His moral philosophy he derived from Kant. To call him an original philosopher is provincial patriotism. His influence did not reach beyond the frontiers of Sweden, nor did it outlast the sixties. His political system was already antiquated in 1865, when the students out of reverence for the philosopher, had still to declare, conformably to his textbook, that the representation of the four estates was the only reasonable one--a doctrine which was subsequently contradicted in the college lectures.