n 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. I saw clearly, as never yet I had seen
before, that the godlike is not alone in the great; for the godlike is
also in the very small, it appears in all its fulness and power in the
most minute dimensions. And thereafter my rocks and crystals served me
as a mirror wherein I might descry mankind, and man's development and
history. These things began to stir powerfully within me; and what I now
vaguely perceived I was soon to view more definitely, and to be able to
study with thoroughness.

Geology and crystallography not only opened up for me a higher circle of
knowledge and insight, but also showed me a higher goal for my inquiry,
my speculation, and my endeavour. Nature and man now seemed to me
mutually to explain each other, through all their numberless various
stages of development. Man, as I saw, receives from a knowledge of
natural objects, even because of their immense deep-seated diversity, a
foundation for, and a guidance towards, a knowledge of himself and of
life, and a preparation for the manifestation of that knowledge. What I
thus clearly perceived in the simpler natural objects I soon traced in
the province of living Nature, in plants and growing things, so far as
these came under my observation, and in the animal kingdom as well.

Soon I became wholly penetrated a