In silent, trustful association with Nature and my mathematics, I lived
for several years after my confirmation. In the latter part of the time
my duties led me towards the study of natural laws, and thus towards the
perception of the unity so often longed for in soul and spirit, and now
at last gradually becoming clear from amidst the outwardly clashing
phenomena of Nature.[89]

At last I could no longer resist the craving for knowledge which I felt
within me. I thrust on one side all the ordinary school-learning which I
utterly failed to appropriate in its customary disconnected state (it
was meant only to be learned by rote, and this I never could recognise
as the exclusive condition of a really comprehensive culture of the
human mind), and I went up in the middle of my eighteenth year to the
University of Jena. As I had been for two years past living completely
with Nature and my mathematics, and dependent upon myself alone for any
culture I might have arrived at, I came to the university much like a
simple plant of nature myself. I was at this time peculiarly moved by a
little knowledge I had picked up about the solar system, including
particularly a general conception of Kepler's laws, whereby the laws of
the spheres appealed to me on the one hand as an all-embracing,
world-encircling whole, and on the other as an unlimited
individualisation into separate natural objects. My own culture had been
hitherto left to myself, and so also now I had to select my own studies
and to choose my courses of lectures for myself. It was to be expected
that the lectures of the professors would produce a singular effect
upon me, and so they did.

I chose as my courses natural history, physics, and mathematics, but I
was little satisfied. I seldom gained what I expected. Everywhere I