point of view by myself in the privacy of my own thoughts, I had to
return to ordinary every-day work, and use them as a means to earn my
living. Yet, though I lived the outward business life to all appearance,
it remained ever foreign to my nature; I carried my own world within
me, and it was that for which I cared and which I cherished. My
observation of life (and especially that of my own life, which I pursued
with the object of self-culture), joined with the love of Nature and
with mathematics to work creatively upon me; and they united to fill my
little mental world with many varied life-forms, and taught me at the
same time to regard my own existence as one member of the great
universal life. My plan of culture was very simple: it was to seek out
the innermost unity connecting the most diverse and widely-separated
phenomena, whether subjective or objective, and whether theoretical or
practical, to learn to see the spiritual side of their activity, to
apprehend their mutual relations as facts and forms of Nature, or to
express them mathematically; and, on the other hand, to contemplate the
natural and mathematical laws as founded in the innermost depths of my
own life as well as in the highest unity of the great whole, that is
indeed to regard them in their unconditioned, uncaused necessity, as
"absolute things-in-themselves." Thus did I continue without ceasing to
systematise, symbolise, idealise, realise and recognise identities and
analogies amongst all facts and phenomena, all problems, expressions,
and formulas which deeply interested me; and in this way life, with all
its varied phenomena and activities, became to me more and more free
from contradictions, more harmonious, simple, and clear, and more
recognisable as a part of the life universal.

After I had lived for some years the isolated life I have described,
though I was engaged the whole time in ordinary professional pursuits,
all at once there broke upon my soul, in harmony with the seasons of