seemed to me, while themselves belonging to a distinct plane of vital
phenomena, the foundation and cornerstones which served to make clear
and definite the laws and the progress of the development, the culture,
and the education of mankind.

It was but natural that such studies should totally absorb me, occupy my
whole energies, and keep me most busily employed. I studied chemistry
and physics with the greatest possible zeal, but the teaching of the
latter did not satisfy me so thoroughly as that of the former.

What in the current half-year's term I was regarding rather from a
theoretical standpoint, I intended in the next half-year to study
practically as a factor of actual life: hence I passed to organic
chemistry and geology.[75] Those laws which I was able to observe in
Nature I desired to trace also in the life and proceedings of man,
wherefore I added to my previous studies history, politics, and
political economy. These practical departments of knowledge brought
vividly home to me the great truth that the most valuable wealth a man
can possess lies in a cultivated mind, and in its suitable exercise upon
matters growing out of its own natural conditions. I saw further that
wealth arose quite as much from vigour of production as from saving by
economical use; and that those productions were the most valuable of
all, which were the outcome and representation of lofty ideas or
remarkable thoughts; and finally, that politics itself was in its
essence but a means of uplifting man from the necessities of Nature and
of life to the freedom of the spirit and the will.

While I received much benefit from the lectures on natural history at
the university, I could not fall in with the views held there as to
fixed forms--crystallography, mineralogy, and natural philosophy. From