After the German war of the spring of 1813 had interrupted my studies at
Berlin, and I had made acquaintance with a soldier's life, its need, and
its habits in Lützow's corps, I returned in 1814 to my studies and to a
scientific public post in Berlin. The care, the arrangement, and in part
the investigation and explanation of crystals were the duties of my
office. Thus I reached at last the central point of my life and
life-aim, where productiveness and law, life, nature, and mathematics
united all of them in the fixed crystalline form, where a world of
symbols offered itself to the inner eye of the mind; for I was
appointed assistant to Weiss at the mineralogical museum of the Berlin
University.[99]

For a long time it was my endeavour and my dearest wish to devote myself
entirely to an academical career, which then appeared to me as my true
vocation and the only solution of the riddle of my life; but the
opportunities I had of observing the natural history students of that
time, their very slight knowledge of their subject, their deficiency of
perceptive power, their still greater want of the true scientific
spirit, warned me back from this plan. On the other hand, the need of
man for a life worthy of his manhood and of his species pressed upon me
with all the more force, and, therefore, teaching and education again
asserted themselves vigorously as the chief subjects occupying my
thoughts. Consequently I was only able to keep my mind contented with
the duties of my post for two years; and, meanwhile, the stones in my
hand and under my eyes turned to living, speaking forms. The
crystal-world, in symbolic fashion, bare unimpeachable witness to me,
through its brilliant unvarying shapes, of life and of the laws of human
life, and spake to me with silent yet true and readable speech of the
real life of the world of mankind.