§ 37. Between the close of the year 1787 and 1797 Pestalozzi did not publish anything. Though he had become famous, had made the acquaintance of the greatest men in Germany, such as Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Fichte, and had been declared a “Citizen of the French Republic,” together with Bentham, Tom Payne, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Washington, Madison, Klopstock, Kozciusko, &c., he was nearly starving, and, naturally enough in that state of affairs both private and public, he was in great despondency. As we have seen, his whole life and work were founded on religion and on the only religion possible for us, the Christian religion; but carried away by his political radicalism he seems at this time to have doubted whether Christianity was more than the highest human wisdom. In October, 1793, he wrote to a friend in Berlin: “I doubt, not because I look on doubt as the truth, but because the sum of the impressions of my life has driven faith with its blessings from my soul. Thus impelled by my fate I see nothing more in Christianity but the purest and noblest teaching of the victory of the spirit over the flesh, the one possible means of raising our nature to its true nobility, or in other words of establishing the empire of the reason over the senses by the development of the purest feelings of the heart.” If this was the lowest point to which Pestalozzi’s faith sank in the days of the Revolution, it remained for practical purposes higher than the faith of most professing Christians then and since. § 38. At this time we find him complaining: “My agriculture swallows up all my time. I am longing for winter with its leisure. My time passes like a shadow.” He was then forty-six years of age and seemed to himself to have done nothing. § 39. Another five years he had to wait before he found an opportunity for action. During this time, impelled by Fichte, he endeavoured to give his ideas philosophic completeness, and after labouring for three years with almost incredible toil he published in 1797 his “Inquiry into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race.” This book is pronounced even by his biographer Guimps to be “prolix and obscure,” and, says Pestalozzi, “nobody understood me.” But even in this book there was much wisdom, had the world cared to learn; but the world had then no place for Pestalozzi, and as he says at the end of this book, “without even asking whether the fault was his or another’s, it crushed him with its iron hammer as the mason crushes a useless stone.” He was, however, not actually crushed, and a place was in time found for him. § 40. The world might be pardoned for neglecting an _Inquiry_ which even a biographer finds “prolix and obscure.” But why could it see nothing in another book which Pestalozzi published in the same year, “Figures to my ABC Book,” or according to its later title, “Fables,” a series of apologues as witty and wise as those of Lessing.[155]