centres of education, as, for example, one of the universities, if that might be.  But it was not long before I found a double deficiency, which quickly discouraged me in this design.  For, firstly, I wanted a fund of specially learned and classical culture; and next, I was generally deficient in the preparatory studies necessary for the higher branches of natural science.  The amount of interest in their work shown by university students was, at the same time, not at all serious enough to attract me to such a career.

I soon perceived a double truth:  first, that a man must be early led towards the knowledge of nature and insight into her methods—­that is, he must be from the first specially trained with this object in view; and next, I saw that a man, thus led through all the due stages of a life-development should in order to be quite sure to accomplish in all steadiness, clearness, and certainty his aim, his vocation, and his destiny, be guarded from the very beginning against a crowd of misconceptions and blunders.  Therefore I determined to devote myself rather to the general subject of the education of man.

Though the splendid lectures I heard on mineralogy, crystallography, geology, etc., led me to see the uniformity of Nature in her working, yet a higher and greater unity lay in my own mind.  To give an example, it was always most unsatisfactory to me to see form developed from a number of various ground-forms.  The object which now lay before my efforts and my thought was to bring out the higher unity underlying external form in such a self-evident shape that it should serve as a type or principle whence all other forms might be derived.  But as I held the laws of form to be fixed, not only for crystals, but also just as firmly for language, it was more particularly a deep philosophical view of language which eventually absorbed my thoughts.  Again, ideas about language which I had conceived long ago in Switzerland crowded before my mind.  It seemed to me that the vowels a, o, u, e, i, ae, au, ei, resembled, so to speak, force, spirit, the (inner) subject, whilst the consonants symbolised matter, body, the (outer) object.  But just as in life and in nature all opposites are only relatively opposed, and within every circle, every sphere, both opposites are found to be contained, so also in language one perceives within the sphere of speech-tones the two opposites of subject and object.  For example, the sound i depicts the absolute subject, the centre, and the sound a the absolute material object; the sound e serves for life as such, for existence in general; and o for individual life, for an existence narrowed to itself alone.

Language, not alone as the material for the expression of thought, but also as a type or epitome of all forms and manifestations of life, appeared to me to underlie the universal laws of expression.  In order to learn these laws thoroughly, as exemplified in the teaching of the classical languages, I now returned again to the study of these latter, under the guidance of a clever teacher; and I began to strike out the special path which seemed to me absolutely necessary to be followed in their acquisition.