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,
in the event, it only too truly proved; but to become thorough Germans,
so I thought, would seem to them something in earnest, something worth
the striving for, especially after such hard and special trials as had
recently been endured by the German nation.
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