me, and it was that for which I cared and which I cherished. My
observation of life (and especially that of my own life, which I pursued
with the object of self-culture), joined with the love of Nature and
with mathematics to work creatively upon me; and they united to fill my
little mental world with many varied life-forms, and taught me at the
same time to regard my own existence as one member of the great
universal life. My plan of culture was very simple: it was to seek out
the innermost unity connecting the most diverse and widely-separated
phenomena, whether subjective or objective, and whether theoretical or
practical, to learn to see the spiritual side of their activity, to
apprehend their mutual relations as facts and forms of Nature, or to
express them mathematically; and, on the other hand, to contemplate the
natural and mathematical laws as founded in the innermost depths of my
own life as well as in the highest unity of the great whole, that is
indeed to regard them in their unconditioned, uncaused necessity, as
"absolute things-in-themselves." Thus did I continue without ceasing to
systematise, symbolise, idealise, realise and recognise identities and
analogies amongst all facts and phenomena, all problems, expressions,
and formulas which deeply interested me; and in this way life, with all
its varied phenomena and activities, became to me more and more free
from contradictions, more harmonious, simple, and clear, and more
recognisable as a part of the life universal.

After I had lived for some years the isolated life I have described,
though I was engaged the whole time in ordinary professional pursuits,
all at once there broke upon my soul, in harmony with the seasons of
nature, a springtime such as I had not before experienced; and an
unexpected life and life-aim budded and blossomed in my breast. All my
inner life and life-aims had become narrowed to the circle of
self-culture and self-education. The outer life, my profession, I
carried on as a mere means of subsistence, quite apart from my real
inner self, and my sphere of operation was limited. I was driven
perforce from pillar to post till at last I had arrived where the Main
unites herself with the Rhine.[90] Here there budded and opened to my
soul one lovely bright spring morning, when I was surrounded by Nature
at her loveliest and freshest, this thought, as it were by
inspiration:--That there must exist somewhere some beautifully simple
and c