But most important of all was the peculiar method of learning at the Latin schools and universities. It is not by the unthinking reception of the material presented to them, but their minds are awakened by their own investigations and researches. In the higher classes of the gymnasiums, and at the universities, the students became the intimates of earnest scholars. It was just the disputed questions which most stirred them: the inquiries still unanswered, and which most powerfully exercised the mind, were those which they most loved to impart. Thus the youth penetrated as free investigator into the very centre of life, and, however far his later vocation might remove him from these investigations, he had received the highest knowledge, and attained to the greatest results of the time; and for the rest of his life was capable of forming a judgment on the greatest questions of science and faith, by accepting or rejecting all the new materials and points of view which he had gained. That these schools of learning made little preparation for practical life, was no tenable complaint. The merchant who took his sons from the university to the counting-house, soon discovered that they had not learnt much with which younger apprentices were conversant, but that they generally repaired the deficiency with the greatest facility. About 1790, this method of culture had attained so much value and importance, that these years might be called the industrious sixth-form period of the German people. Eagerly did they learn, and everywhere did active spontaneous labour take the place of the old mechanism. Philanthropically did the learned strive to create educational establishments for every class of the people, and to invent new methods of instruction by which the greatest results could be obtained from those who had least powers of learning. To instruct, to educate, and to raise people from a state of ignorance, was the general desire; not that this was useful to the nation in general, for the lower classes could not enter into the exalted feelings which gave to the literary such enjoyment and elevation of mind. It is true they themselves felt an inward dissatisfaction. The facts of life which surrounded them were often in cutting contrast to their ideal requirements. When the peasant worked like a beast of burden, and the soldier ran the gauntlet before their windows, nothing seemed to remain to them but to shut themselves up in their studies, and to occupy their eyes and mind with times in which they were not wounded by such barbarities. For it had not yet been tried, what the union of men of similar views in a great association would accomplish, in bringing about changes in the State and every sphere of practical interest.