t the same time a
remarkable testimony to his precocious powers of observation. What is
interesting in these intimacies as throwing light on Goethe's early
characteristics is, that all these persons were of mature age, and all
of them more or less eccentric in their habits and ways of thinking.
"Even in God I discover defects," was the remark of one of them to his
youthful listener--to whom he had been communicating his views on the
world in general. In the company of these elders, with such or kindred
opinions, Goethe was early familiarised with the variability of human
judgments on fundamental questions. And he laid the experience to
heart, for on no point in the conduct of life does he insist with
greater emphasis than the folly of expecting others to think as
ourselves.

The method of Goethe's education was not such as to compensate for the
lack of moral discipline which has already been noted. With the
exception of a brief interval, he received instruction at home, either
directly from his father or from tutors under his superintendence.
Thus he missed both the steady drill of school life and the influence
of companions of his own age which might have made him more of a boy
and less of a premature man.[9] It is Goethe's own expressed opinion
that the object of education should be to foster tastes rather than to
communicate knowledge. In this object, at least, his own education was
perfectly successful; for the tastes which he acquired under his
father's roof remained with him to the end. What strikes us in his
course of study is its desultoriness and its comprehensiveness. At one
time and another he gained an acquaintance with English, French,
Italian, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He read widely in history, secular
and sacred, and in the later stage of his early studies he took up law
at the express desire of his father. It was the aim of his father's
scheme of education that accomplishments should form an essential part
of it. So his son was taught music, drawing, dancing, riding, and
fencing. But there was another side to Goethe's early training which,
in his case, deserves to be specially emphasised. A striking
characteristic of Goethe's writings is the knowledge they display of
the whole range of the manual arts, and this knowledge he owed to the
circumstances of his home. His father, a virtuoso with the means of
gratifying his tastes, freely employed artists of all kinds to execute
designs of his own conception;