My position was now a very pleasant one, and I felt soothing and cheering influences such as had not visited me before.

In the autumn holidays, too, a friendly home was ready to receive me.  Besides the country-clergyman brother, who so often was a power for good in my life, I had another brother, also older than I, who had been living more than ten years as a well-established tradesman and citizen in Osterode, amongst the Harz Mountains; head of a quiet, self-contained, happy family, and father of some fine children.  My previous life and endeavours as an educator had already brought me into connection with this circle; for I had not failed whenever I found anything suitable to my brother’s needs to let him know of it, as he was the conscientious teacher and educator of his own children.  It was in this peaceful, active family-circle of an intellectual tradesman’s home that I passed all the vacation time during which the university regulations released me from vigorous work.  It could not prove otherwise than that such a visit should be of the greatest service to me in my general development, and I remember it with thankfulness even yet on that account.

I return now to my university life.  Physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and natural history in general, were my principal studies.

The inner law and order embracing all things, and in itself conditioned and necessitated, now presented itself to me in such clearness that I could see nothing either in nature or in life in which it was not made manifest, although varying greatly according to its several manifestations, in complexity and in gradation.  Just at this time those great discoveries of the French and English philosophers became generally known through which the great manifold external world was seen to form a comprehensive outer unity.  And the labours of the German and Swedish philosophers to express these essentially conditioned fundamental laws in terms of weight and number, so that they might be studied and understood in their most exact expression, and in their mutual interchange and connection, fitted in exactly with my own longings and endeavours.  Natural science and natural researches now seemed to me, while themselves belonging to a distinct plane of vital phenomena, the foundation and cornerstones which served to make clear and definite the laws and the progress of the development, the culture, and the education of mankind.

It was but natural that such studies should totally absorb me, occupy my whole energies, and keep me most busily employed.  I studied chemistry and physics with the greatest possible zeal, but the teaching of the latter did not satisfy me so thoroughly as that of the former.