Leaving everything else, sacrificing everything else,[100] I was driven
back upon the education of man, driven also to my refuge in Nature,
wherein as in a mirror I saw reflected the laws of the development of
being, which laws I was now to turn to account for the education of my
race. My task was to educate man in his true humanity, to educate man
in his absolute being, according to the universal laws of all
development.[101] Therefore, leaving Berlin, and laying down my office,
I began late in the autumn of 1816 that educational work which, though
it still takes its impulse from me and exists under my leadership, yet
in its deepest nature is self-sufficient and self-conditioned.

Although I was not perhaps then capable of putting my convictions into
words, I at once realised this work in my own mind as comprehensive and
world-embracing in its nature, as an everlasting work to be evermore
performed for the benefit of the whole human race; yet I nevertheless
linked it, and for this very reason, to my own personal life; that is,
since I had no children of my own, I took to me my dear nephews whom I
most deeply loved, in order through them and with them to work out
blessings for my home and my native land, for Schwarzburg and Thuringia,
and so for the whole wide Fatherland itself.[102] The eternal
principles of development, as I recognised them within me, would have
it thus and not otherwise.

Timidly, very timidly, did I venture to call my work by the title of
"German," or "Universal German" education; and, indeed, I struck that
out from one of my manuscripts, although it was precisely the name
required to start with as it expressed the broad nature of my proposed
institution. An appeal to the general public to become thorough _men_
seemed to me too grandiose, too liable to be misunderstood, as, indeed,