Therefore I determined to devote myself
rather to the general subject of the education of man.
Though the splendid lectures I heard on mineralogy, crystallography,
geology, etc., led me to see the uniformity of Nature in her working,
yet a higher and greater unity lay in my own mind. To give an example,
it was always most unsatisfactory to me to see form developed from a
number of various ground-forms. The object which now lay before my
efforts and my thought was to bring out the higher unity underlying
external form in such a self-evident shape that it should serve as a
type or principle whence all other forms might be derived. But as I held
the laws of form to be fixed, not only for crystals, but also just as
firmly for language, it was more particularly a deep philosophical view
of language which eventually absorbed my thoughts. Again, ideas about
language which I had conceived long ago in Switzerland crowded before my
mind. It seemed to me that the vowels _a_, _o_, _u_, _e_, _i_, _ae_,
_au_, _ei_, resembled, so to speak, force, spirit, the (inner) subject,
whilst the consonants symbolised matter, body, the (outer) object. But
just as in life and in nature all opposites are only relatively opposed,
and within every circle, every sphere, both opposites are found to be
contained, so also in language one perceives within the sphere of
speech-tones the two opposites of subject and object.
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