Thus I had lived through the whole campaign according to my strength, greater or less, in a steady inner struggle towards unity and harmony of life, but what of outward significance and worth recollection had I received from the soldier's life? I left the army and the warlike career with a total feeling of discontent. My inner yearning for unity and harmony, for inward peace, was so powerful that it shaped itself unconsciously into symbolical form and figure. In a ceaseless, inexplicable, anxious state of longing and unrest, I had passed through many pretty places and many gardens on my homeward way, without any of them pleasing me. In this mood I reached F——, and entered a fairly large and handsomely-stocked flower garden. I gazed at all the vigorous plants and fresh gay flowers it offered me, but no flower took my fancy. As I passed all the many varied beauties of the garden in review before my mind, it fell upon me suddenly that I missed the lily. I asked the owner of the garden if he had no lilies there, and he quietly replied, No! When I expressed my surprise, I was answered as quietly as before that hitherto no one had missed the lily. It was thus that I came to know what I missed and longed for. How could my inner nature have expressed itself more beautifully in words? "Thou art seeking silent peacefulness of heart, harmony of life, clear purity of soul, by the symbol of this silent, pure, simple lily." That garden, in its beautiful variety, but without a lily, appeared to me as a gay life passed through and squandered without unity and harmony. Another day I saw many lovely lilies blooming in the garden of a house in the country. Great was my joy; but, alas! they were separated from me by a hedge. Later on I solved this symbol also; and until its solution image and longing remained stored in my memory. One thing I ought to notice—namely, that in the place where I was vainly seeking for lilies in the garden a little boy of three years old came up trustfully and stood by my side.
I hastened to the scene of my new duties. How variously the different outward circumstances of my life henceforth affected me as to the life within, now that this had won for itself once more an assured individual form, and how my life again resumed its true and highest aspect, I must pass over here, since to develop these considerations with all their connections would take me too long.
In the first days of August 1814 I arrived at Berlin, and at once received my promised appointment. My duties busied me the greater part of the day amongst minerals, dumb witnesses to the silent thousand-fold creative energy of Nature, and I had to see to their arrangement in a locked, perfectly quiet room. While engaged on this work I continually proved to be true what had long been a presentiment with me—namely, that even in these so-called lifeless stones and fragments of rock, torn from their original bed, there lay germs of transforming, developing energy and activity. Amidst the diversity of forms around me, I recognised under all kinds of various modifications one law of development.
All the points that in Göttingen I had thought I traced amidst outward circumstances, confirmatory of the order of the soul's development, came before me here also, in a hundred and again a hundred phenomena. What I had recognised in things great or noble, or in the life of man, or in the ways of God, as serving towards the development of the human race, I found I could here recognise also in the smallest of these fixed forms which Nature alone had shaped. I saw clearly, as never yet I had seen before, that the godlike is not alone in the great; for the godlike is also in the very small, it appears in all its fulness and power in the most minute dimensions. And thereafter my rocks and crystals served me as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man's development and history. These things began to stir powerfully within me; and what I now vaguely perceived I was soon to view more definitely, and to be able to study with thoroughness.
Geology and crystallography not only opened up for me a higher circle of knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry, my speculation, and my endeavour. Nature and man now seemed to me mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various stages of development. Man, as I saw, receives from a knowledge of natural objects, even because of their immense deep-seated diversity, a foundation for, and a guidance towards, a knowledge of himself and of life, and a preparation for the manifestation of that knowledge. What I thus clearly perceived in the simpler natural objects I soon traced in the province of living Nature, in plants and growing things, so far as these came under my observation, and in the animal kingdom as well.
Soon I became wholly penetrated and absorbed by the thought that it must be beyond everything else vital to man's culture and development, to the sure attainment of his destiny and fulfilment of his vocation, to distinguish these tendencies accurately and sharply not only in their separate ascending grades, but also throughout the whole career of life. Moreover, I made a resolution that for some time I would devote myself to the study of the higher methods of teaching, so as to fit myself as a teacher in one of the higher centres of education, as, for example, one of the universities, if that might be. But it was not long before I found a double deficiency, which quickly discouraged me in this design. For, firstly, I wanted a fund of specially learned and classical culture; and next, I was generally deficient in the preparatory studies necessary for the higher branches of natural science. The amount of interest in their work shown by university students was, at the same time, not at all serious enough to attract me to such a career.
I soon perceived a double truth: first, that a man must be early led towards the knowledge of nature and insight into her methods—that is, he must be from the first specially trained with this object in view; and next, I saw that a man, thus led through all the due stages of a life-development should in order to be quite sure to accomplish in all steadiness, clearness, and certainty his aim, his vocation, and his destiny, be guarded from the very beginning against a crowd of misconceptions and blunders. Therefore I determined to devote myself rather to the general subject of the education of man.
Though the splendid lectures I heard on mineralogy, crystallography, geology, etc., led me to see the uniformity of Nature in her working, yet a higher and greater unity lay in my own mind. To give an example, it was always most unsatisfactory to me to see form developed from a number of various ground-forms. The object which now lay before my efforts and my thought was to bring out the higher unity underlying external form in such a self-evident shape that it should serve as a type or principle whence all other forms might be derived. But as I held the laws of form to be fixed, not only for crystals, but also just as firmly for language, it was more particularly a deep philosophical view of language which eventually absorbed my thoughts. Again, ideas about language which I had conceived long ago in Switzerland crowded before my mind. It seemed to me that the vowels a, o, u, e, i, ä, au, ei, resembled, so to speak, force, spirit, the (inner) subject, whilst the consonants symbolised matter, body, the (outer) object. But just as in life and in nature all opposites are only relatively opposed, and within every circle, every sphere, both opposites are found to be contained, so also in language one perceives within the sphere of speech-tones the two opposites of subject and object. For example, the sound i depicts the absolute subject, the centre, and the sound a the absolute material object; the sound e serves for life as such, for existence in general; and o for individual life, for an existence narrowed to itself alone.
Language, not alone as the material for the expression of thought, but also as a type or epitome of all forms and manifestations of life, appeared to me to underlie the universal laws of expression. In order to learn these laws thoroughly, as exemplified in the teaching of the classical languages, I now returned again to the study of these latter, under the guidance of a clever teacher; and I began to strike out the special path which seemed to me absolutely necessary to be followed in their acquisition.
From this time onwards I gave all my thoughts to methods of education, whereto I was also further incited by some keen critical lectures on the history of ancient philosophy. These again afforded me a clear conviction of the soundness of my views of Nature and of the laws of human development.