to comprehend them all. And how should we define _Gothic_ or
_Romanic_ architecture, remembering that as no Goths had anything to
do with pointed arches, neither were any Romans responsible for the
flat roofs of the German churches of the Saxon emperors.

Enough to show what I meant when I said that Professor Drobisch, in
his Lectures on Herbart, gave one great encouragement in the special
work in which I was already engaged as a mere student, the Science of
Language and Etymology. If Herbart declared philosophy to consist in a
thorough examination (_Bearbeitung_) of concepts, or conceptual
knowledge, my answer was, Only let it be historical, nay, in the
beginning, etymological; I was not so foolish as to imagine that a
word as used at present, meant what it meant etymologically. _Deus_ no
longer meant brilliant, but it should be the object of the true
historian of language to prove how _Deus_, having meant originally
brilliant, came to mean what it means now.

For a time I thought of becoming a philosopher, and that sounded so
grand that the idea of preparing for a mere schoolmaster, teaching
Greek and Latin, seemed to me more and more too narrow a sphere. Soon,
however, while dreaming of a chair of philosophy at a German
University, I began to feel that I must know something special,
something that no other philosopher knew, and that induced me to learn
Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. I had only heard what we call in German
the chiming, not the striking of the bells of Indian philosophy; I had
read Frederick Schlegel's explanatory book _Ueber die Sprache und
Weisheit der Indier_ (1808), and looked into Windischmann's _Die
Philosophie im Fortgange der Weltgeschichte_ (1827-1834). These books
are hardly opened now--they are antiquated, and more than antiquated;
they are full of mistakes as to facts, and mistakes as to the
conclusions drawn from them. But they had ushered new ideas into the
world of thought, and they left on many, as they did on me, that
feeling which the digger who prospects for minerals is said to have,
that there must be gold beneath the surface, if people would only dig.
That feeling was very vague as yet, and might have been entirely
deceptive, nor did I see my way to go beyond the point reached by
these two dreamers or explorers. The thought remained in the
rubbish-chamber of my mind, and though forgotten at the time, broke
forth again when there was an opportunity. It was a fortunate
coincidence