These depressing reflections, as I was soon convinced, were only to be banished by activity; but of what was I to take hold?  I had, indeed, much to make up for in many things, and to prepare myself, in more than one sense, for the university, which I was now to attend; but I relished and accomplished nothing.  Much appeared to me familiar and trivial:  for grounding myself, in several respects, I found neither strength within nor opportunity without; and I therefore suffered myself to be moved by the taste of my good room-neighbor, to a study which was altogether new and strange to me, and which for a long time offered me a wide field of information and thought.  For my friend began to make me acquainted with the secrets of philosophy.  He had studied in Jena, under Daries, and, possessing a well-regulated mind, had acutely seized the relations of that doctrine, which he now sought to impart to me.  But, unfortunately, these things would not hang together in such a fashion in my brain.  I put questions, which he promised to answer afterwards:  I made demands, which he promised to satisfy in future.  But our most important difference was this:  that I maintained a separate philosophy was not necessary, as the whole of it was already contained in religion and poetry.  This he would by no means allow, but rather tried to prove to me that these must first be founded on philosophy; which I stubbornly denied, and, at every step in the progress of our discussions, found arguments for my opinion.  For as in poetry a certain faith in the impossible, and as in religion a like faith in the inscrutable, must have a place, the philosophers appeared to me to be in a very false position who would demonstrate and explain both of them from their own field of vision.  Besides, it was very quickly proved, from the history of philosophy, that one always sought a ground different from that of the other, and that the sceptic, in the end, pronounced every thing groundless and useless.

However, this very history of philosophy, which my friend was compelled to go over with me, because I could learn nothing from dogmatical discourse, amused me very much, but only on this account, that one doctrine or opinion seemed to me as good as another, so far, at least, as I was capable of penetrating into it.  With the most ancient men and schools I was best pleased, because poetry, religion, and philosophy were completely combined into one; and I only maintained that first opinion of mine with the more animation, when the Book of Job and the Song and Proverbs of Solomon, as well as the lays of Orpheus and Hesiod, seemed to bear valid witness in its favor.  My friend had taken the smaller work of Brucker as the foundation of his discourse; and, the farther we went on, the less I could make of it.  I could not clearly see what the first Greek philosophers would have.  Socrates I esteemed as an excellent, wise man, who in his life and death might well be compared with Christ.