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