and, therefore, teaching and education again asserted themselves vigorously as the chief subjects occupying my thoughts.  Consequently I was only able to keep my mind contented with the duties of my post for two years; and, meanwhile, the stones in my hand and under my eyes turned to living, speaking forms.  The crystal-world, in symbolic fashion, bare unimpeachable witness to me, through its brilliant unvarying shapes, of life and of the laws of human life, and spake to me with silent yet true and readable speech of the real life of the world of mankind.

Leaving everything else, sacrificing everything else,[100] I was driven back upon the education of man, driven also to my refuge in Nature, wherein as in a mirror I saw reflected the laws of the development of being, which laws I was now to turn to account for the education of my race.  My task was to educate man in his true humanity, to educate man in his absolute being, according to the universal laws of all development.[101] Therefore, leaving Berlin, and laying down my office, I began late in the autumn of 1816 that educational work which, though it still takes its impulse from me and exists under my leadership, yet in its deepest nature is self-sufficient and self-conditioned.

Although I was not perhaps then capable of putting my convictions into words, I at once realised this work in my own mind as comprehensive and world-embracing in its nature, as an everlasting work to be evermore performed for the benefit of the whole human race; yet I nevertheless linked it, and for this very reason, to my own personal life; that is, since I had no children of my own, I took to me my dear nephews whom I most deeply loved, in order through them and with them to work out blessings for my home and my native land, for Schwarzburg and Thuringia, and so for the whole wide Fatherland itself.[102] The eternal principles of development, as I recognised them within me, would have it thus and not otherwise.

Timidly, very timidly, did I venture to call my work by the title of “German,” or “Universal German” education; and, indeed, I struck that out from one of my manuscripts, although it was precisely the name required to start with as it expressed the broad nature of my proposed institution.  An appeal to the general public to become thorough men seemed to me too grandiose, too liable to be misunderstood, as, indeed, in the event, it only too truly proved; but to become thorough Germans, so I thought, would seem to them something in earnest, something worth the striving for, especially after such hard and special trials as had recently been endured by the German nation.