al effort
and activity of that stirring time (1805 to 1810), as regards teaching,
philosophy, history, politics, and natural science.[97]

But the nobler, the more varied, the more animating was the life
surrounding me, and the more I found all without me, as also all within
me, striving and tending towards harmony and unity, by so much the less
could I longer be restrained from seeking out this unity, even should it
be at the sacrifice of all that was dear to me, if need were for that. I
was impelled to seek to develop this unity all bright and living within
my own soul, and to contemplate it in definite, clear, and independent
form, so that finally I might be able to set it forth in my actual life
with sureness and certainty.

After nine years' interval I visited the university a second time; first
(spring of 1810) at Goettingen, and then a year and a half later (autumn
of 1811) at Berlin.[98]

I now began to pursue the study of languages. The linguistic treasures
which recent discoveries had brought us from Asia excited my deepest
interest wherever I came into contact with them.

But in general the means of acquiring languages were too lifeless, too
wanting in connection to be of any use to me; and the effort to work
them out afresh in my own way, soon led me to a renewed study of Nature.
Nature held me henceforth so fast that for years I was chained
uninterruptedly to her study, though truly languages went on as a
side-study during the time. Yet it was not as separate entities that I
considered the phenomena I was working at; rather was it as parts of the
great whole of natural life, and this also I regarded as reposing in one
supreme unity together with all mankind; Nature and man, the two
opposite mutually casting light upon each other and mirroring each
other.

After the German war of the spring of 1813 had interrupted my studies at
Berlin, and I had made acquaintance with a soldier's life, its need, and
its habits in Luetzow's corps, I returned in 1814 to my studies and to a
scientific public post in Berlin. The care, the arrangement, and in part
the investigation and explanation of crystals were the duties of my
office. Thus I reached at last the central point of my life and
life-aim, where productiveness and law, life, nature, and mathematics
united all of them in the fixed crystalline form, where a world of
symbols offered itself to the inner eye of the mind; for I was
appointed assistant to Weiss at th