Victor first fructified his soul with great Nature or with poets, and then, and not till then, awaited the dawn of a system. He discovered (not invented) the truth by soaring and surveying, not by penetration, microscopic inspection, and syllogistic groping from one syllable of the book of nature to another, _whereby one gets its words indeed, but not their sense_. That creeping and touching belongs, he said, not to the _finding_, but to the _proving_ and confirming of truth; for which he always took lessons of Bayle: for no one is a poorer teacher in the discovery of truth, or a better one for the proof of it, than acuteness or Bayle, who is its mint-assayer, but not its miner. * * * * * THE ESSAY. If I wrote it in Göttingen, I might make it in paragraphs and more thoroughly, because the Flachsenfingen folks would not disturb me. Meanwhile it must still be written here, in order that I may have a patron and advocate in my own person against the court-gentlemen, who want to transform my soul into my body. The Brain and Nerves are the true body of the "I"; the rest of the environment is only the body of that body, the nourishing and protecting bark of that tender pith.--And as all the changes of the world appear to us only as changes of that pith or marrow, accordingly the pith- and pulp-ball with its streaks is the proper world-globe of the soul. The inverted nervous tree springs from the swollen brain of the fœtus as from a kernel, which it also resembles in appearance, and ascends with--sensitive branches as spinal marrow, even to the anatomical summit of the horse-tail. This marrowy growth is grafted upon the venous tree as a consuming parasitic plant. And as every twig is a tree in miniature, accordingly--for all this is not a correspondence of wit, but of nature--the nervous ganglia are fourth cerebral chambers in small. The terminations of the nerves, in their development, open out on the retina, on the Schneiderian[135] membrane, in the gustative knot, &c., into leaf and flower. Hence, e. g., we see not with the continuation of the optic nerve, but with the delicate unravelling of its stamina; for the great dissolving picture-gallery on the retina cannot possibly, by a movement of the nervous spirit, (or whatever one will assume--for after all it comes back to motion,) be slid back to the brain; in which case, besides, the two galleries of the two eyes would have to pass through the two prongs of the visual nerve and coincide at its handle to one picture.