form, with its previously-appointed teaching-course arranged as to times
and subjects; and everything must fit in like a piece of clockwork. My
system, on the other hand, called only for ready senses and awakened
intellect. Set forms could only tolerate this view of education so far
as it served to enliven and quicken them. But I have unfortunately again
and again observed during my career, that even the most active life, if
its activity and its vitality be not properly understood and urged ever
onward, easily stiffens into bony rigidity. Enough, my mind, now fully
awakened, could not suffer these set forms, necessary though they were;
and I felt that I must seek out some position in which my nature could
unfold itself freely according to the needs of the development of my
life and of my mind.

This longing endeavour of life and mind, which could not submit to the
fetters of external limitations, may have been the more exaggerated at
the time by my becoming acquainted with Arndt's "Fragments on Human
Culture,"[57] which I had purchased. This book satisfied at once my
character, my resolves, and my aspirations; and what hitherto lay
isolated within me was brought into ordered connection through its
pages, while ideas which possessed me without my perceiving them took
definite form and expression as the book brought them to light. Indeed,
I thought then that Arndt's book was the bible of education.

In those days I spoke of my life and my aims in the following words: "I
desire to educate men whose feet shall stand on God's earth, rooted fast
in Nature, while their head towers up to heaven, and reads its secrets
with steady gaze, whose heart shall embrace both earth and heaven, shall
enjoy the life of earth and nature with all its wealth of forms, and at
the same time shall recognise the purity and peace of heaven, that
unites in its love God's earth with God's heaven." In these phrases I
now see my former life and aims vividly brought before me as in a
picture.

Little by little a desire gained strength within me to free myself from
my engagement at the Model School, to which I had bound myself as
teacher for at least three years. The headmaster (Gruner), whom I have
already named, was sufficiently a student of men to have perceived that
so excitable a man as I could never work harmoniously in such an
institution as that which he directed; so I was released from my
engagement, under the condition that I should provide a