“I now had what I needed: to the Church was added the Nature-Temple; to the religious Christian life, the life of Nature; to the passionate discord of human life, the tranquil peace of plants. From that time it was as if I held the clew of Ariadne to guide me through the labyrinth of life. From that time humanity and Nature, the life of the soul and the life of the flower, were closely knit together in my mind; and I can still see my hazel buds, like angels, opening for me the great God’s temple of Nature” (7: p. 12). His craze for unity we can largely explain as the result of the longing of his restless soul and hungry heart for peace. Naturally he found a predetermined fascination in Schelling’s “Identity Philosophy,” in which the subjective and the objective worlds are identified in one principle. On the other hand, self-analysis necessarily leads one to the desire of self-perfection and self-education; thus his incessant thirst for “higher culture.” So it came that “I carried my own world within me, and it was that for which I cared and which I cherished” (7: p. 107). One thing saved him from falling into a life of pure reflection. It was the early habit of engaging in manual occupations around the home. This he was partly forced to do in accordance with the wish of his rigorous father, but he did it also from his own inclination. In fact, this was another refuge for him. Probably his restless soul, oppressed by the indifference and misapprehension of his parents, as also by isolation from his playmates, herein found its free expression. Thus, religion, Nature, and manual work were the three great agents of his own education, which he later believed also to be the essential for all others. He calls the love of Nature, the instinct of workmanship, and religious feeling “the primitive and natural inclinations of every human being” (7: p. 5). And all these were for him the manifestations of a restless, incessant desire and endeavor for unity and harmony, which he asserts is “the basis of all genuinely human development and cultivation.” “The Education of Man,” the most important of his writings, opens with the following passage: “In all things there lives and reigns an eternal law.... This all-controlling law is necessarily based on an all-pervading, energetic, living, self-conscious, and hence, eternal unity.... This unity is God. All things live and have their being in and through the Divine Unity, in and through God.... It is the destiny and lifework of all things to unfold their essence, ... and, therefore, the Divine Unity itself” (5: pp. 1-2).