e mineralogical museum of the Berlin
University.[99]

For a long time it was my endeavour and my dearest wish to devote myself
entirely to an academical career, which then appeared to me as my true
vocation and the only solution of the riddle of my life; but the
opportunities I had of observing the natural history students of that
time, their very slight knowledge of their subject, their deficiency of
perceptive power, their still greater want of the true scientific
spirit, warned me back from this plan. On the other hand, the need of
man for a life worthy of his manhood and of his species pressed upon me
with all the more force, and, therefore, teaching and education again
asserted themselves vigorously as the chief subjects occupying my
thoughts. Consequently I was only able to keep my mind contented with
the duties of my post for two years; and, meanwhile, the stones in my
hand and under my eyes turned to living, speaking forms. The
crystal-world, in symbolic fashion, bare unimpeachable witness to me,
through its brilliant unvarying shapes, of life and of the laws of human
life, and spake to me with silent yet true and readable speech of the
real life of the world of mankind.

Leaving everything else, sacrificing everything else,[100] I was driven
back upon the education of man, driven also to my refuge in Nature,
wherein as in a mirror I saw reflected the laws of the development of
being, which laws I was now to turn to account for the education of my
race. My task was to educate man in his true humanity, to educate man
in his absolute being, according to the universal laws of all
development.[101] Therefore, leaving Berlin, and laying down my office,
I began late in the autumn of 1816 that educational work which, though
it still takes its impulse from me and exists under my leadership, yet
in its deepest nature is self-sufficient and self-conditioned.

Although I was not perhaps then capable of putting my convictions into
words, I at once realised this work in my own mind as comprehensive and
world-embracing in its nature, as an everlasting work to be evermore
performed for the benefit of the whole human race; yet I nevertheless
linked it, and for this very reason, to my own personal life; that is,
since I had no children of my own, I took to me my dear nephews whom I
most deeply loved, in order through them and with them to work out
blessings for my home and my native land, for Schwarzburg and Thuringia,
and so