In the first days of August 1814 I arrived at Berlin, and at once
received my promised appointment. My duties busied me the greater part
of the day amongst minerals, dumb witnesses to the silent thousand-fold
creative energy of Nature, and I had to see to their arrangement in a
locked, perfectly quiet room. While engaged on this work I continually
proved to be true what had long been a presentiment with me--namely,
that even in these so-called lifeless stones and fragments of rock, torn
from their original bed, there lay germs of transforming, developing
energy and activity. Amidst the diversity of forms around me, I
recognised under all kinds of various modifications one law of
development.
All the points that in Goettingen I had thought I traced amidst outward
circumstances, confirmatory of the order of the soul's development, came
before me here also, in a hundred and again a hundred phenomena. What I
had recognised in things great or noble, or in the life of man, or in
the ways of God, as serving towards the development of the human race, I
found I could here recognise also in the smallest of these fixed forms
which Nature alone had shaped.
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