At Nürnberg he found the post of rector of the 'gymnasium' by no means a sinecure. The school had to be made amid much lack of funds and general bankruptcy of apparatus:--all because of an all-powerful and unalterable destiny which is called the course of business.' One of his tasks was 'by graduated exercises to introduce his pupils to speculative thought,'--and that in the space of four hours weekly[5]. Of its practicability--and especially with himself as instrument--he had grave doubts. In theory, he held that an intelligent study of the ancient classics was the best introduction to philosophy; and practically he preferred starting his pupils with the principles of law, morality and religion, and reserving the logic and higher philosophy for the highest class. Meanwhile he continued to work on his great Logic, the first volume of which appeared in two parts, 1812, 1813, and the second in 1816. This is the work which is the real foundation of the Hegelian philosophy. Its aim is the systematic reorganisation of the commonwealth of thought. It gives not a criticism, like Kant; not a principle, like Fichte; not a bird's eye view of the fields of nature and history, like Schelling; it attempts the hard work of re-constructing, step by step, into totality the fragments of the organism of intelligence. It is scholasticism, if scholasticism means an absolute and all-embracing system; but it is a protest against the old school-system and those who tried to rehabilitate it through their comprehensions of the Kantian theory. Apropos of the logic of his contemporary Fries (whom he did not love), published in 1811, he remarks: 'His paragraphs are mindless, quite shallow, bald, trivial; the explanatory notes are the dirty linen of the professorial chair, utterly slack and unconnected.'[6] Of himself he thus speaks: 'I am a schoolmaster who has to teach philosophy,--who, possibly for that reason, believes that philosophy like geometry is teachable, and must no less than geometry have a regular structure. But again, a knowledge of the facts in geometry and philosophy is one thing, and the mathematical or philosophical talent which procreates and discovers is another: my province is to discover that scientific form, or to aid in the formation of it[7].' So he writes to an old college friend; and in a letter to the rationalist theologian Paulus, in 1814[8], he professes: 'You know that I have had too much to do not merely with ancient literature, but even with mathematics, latterly with the higher analysis, differential calculus, chemistry, to let myself be taken in by the humbug of Naturphilosophie, philosophising without knowledge of fact and by mere force of imagination, and treating mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as Ideas.'