Goethe was not temperamentally given to reflecting deliberately about his own cognitional processes. Moreover, the excess of reflexion going on around him in the intellectual life of his younger days inclined him to guard himself with a certain anxiety against philosophical cogitations. His words to a friend - 'Dear friend, I have done it well, and never reflected about thinking' - bring this home to us. If in his later years Goethe could become to some degree epistemologically conscious of his spiritual achievements, as, for instance, his essay on Intuitive Judgment shows, he owed this to his friendship with Schiller, who became for him a kind of soul mirror, in which he could see the reflexion of his own processes of consciousness. Indeed, at their first personal encounter, significant as it was for their whole later relationship, Schiller - though all unconsciously - performed a decisive service of this kind for him. Goethe himself speaks of the occasion in his essay Happy Encounter (Gliickliches Ereignis), written twelve years after Schiller's death. The occasion was, outwardly regarded, fortuitous: both men were leaving a lecture on natural science at the University of Jena, Schiller having been present as Professor of History in the University, and Goethe as its patron and as a Weimar Minister of State. They met at the door of the lecture hall and went out into the street together. Schiller, who had been wanting to come into closer contact with Goethe for a long time, used the opportunity to begin a conversation. He opened with a comment on the lecture they had just heard, saying that such a piecemeal way of handling nature could not bring the layman any real satisfaction. Goethe, to whom this remark was heartily welcome, replied that such a style of scientific observation 'was uncanny even for the initiated, and that there must certainly be another way altogether, which did not treat of nature as divided and in pieces, but presented her as working and alive, striving out of the whole into the parts'. Schiller's interest was at once aroused by this remark, although as a thorough Kantian he could not conceal his doubts whether the kind of thing indicated by Goethe was within human capacity. Goethe began to explain himself further, and so the discussion proceeded, until the speakers arrived at Schiller's house. Quite absorbed in his description of plant metamorphosis, Goethe went in with Schiller and climbed the stairs to the latter's study. Once there, he seized pen and paper from Schiller's writing desk, and to bring his conception of the ur-plant vividly before his companion's eyes he made 'a symbolic plant appear with many a characteristic stroke of the pen'.