[89]
At last I could no longer resist the craving for knowledge which I felt
within me. I thrust on one side all the ordinary school-learning which I
utterly failed to appropriate in its customary disconnected state (it
was meant only to be learned by rote, and this I never could recognise
as the exclusive condition of a really comprehensive culture of the
human mind), and I went up in the middle of my eighteenth year to the
University of Jena. As I had been for two years past living completely
with Nature and my mathematics, and dependent upon myself alone for any
culture I might have arrived at, I came to the university much like a
simple plant of nature myself. I was at this time peculiarly moved by a
little knowledge I had picked up about the solar system, including
particularly a general conception of Kepler's laws, whereby the laws of
the spheres appealed to me on the one hand as an all-embracing,
world-encircling whole, and on the other as an unlimited
individualisation into separate natural objects. My own culture had been
hitherto left to myself, and so also now I had to select my own studies
and to choose my courses of lectures for myself.
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