For the rest, his origin, training, and vocation seem all to have been sufficiently German. He came, like many other eminent men, out of a Swabian parsonage, and was himself intended for theology, only branching off into philosophy after his university career was well advanced. At the age of sixteen he was deeply influenced, as so many others have been, by Herder’s “Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit”; that not only harmonised with his own tendency at the time towards a mixed theism and pantheism, but it first planted within him the conception of evolution in human history, proceeding from an animal origin, which became a fundamental element of his mental constitution. When a year later he came across Darwin’s doctrines he felt that he knew them beforehand. These influences were balanced by that of Plato, through whose “Ideas” he caught his first glimpse of an “As-If world.” A little later the strenuous training of one of his teachers in the logical analysis of Latin syntax, especially in the use of the conjunctions, furnished the source from which subsequently he drew that now well-known phrase. It was in these years that he reached the view, which he has since definitely advocated, that philosophy should not be made a separate study, but should become a natural part and corollary of every study, since philosophy cannot be fruitfully regarded as a discipline by itself. Without psychology, especially, he finds that philosophy is merely “a methodic abstraction.” A weighty influence of these days was constituted by the poems and essays of Schiller, a Swabian like himself, and, indeed, associated with the history of his own family. Schiller was not only an inspiring influence, but it was in Schiller’s saying, “Error alone is life, and knowledge is death,” that he found (however unjustifiably) the first expression of his own “fictionalism,” while Schiller’s doctrine of the play impulse as the basis of artistic creation and enjoyment seemed the prophecy of his own later doctrine, for in play he saw later the “as if” as the kernel of æsthetic practice and contemplation.