The distractions of Strassburg, no more than the distractions of Leipzig, diverted Goethe from what were his ruling instincts from the beginning--to know life and to be master of himself. As in Leipzig, his professional studies in Strassburg held little place in his thoughts; his law degree, he tells us, he regarded as a matter of "secondary importance." The subject he chose as his thesis--the obligation of magistrates to impose a State religion binding on all their subjects--was of a nature that had no living interest for him at any period of his life, and he wrote the thesis "only to satisfy his father." If his law studies were neglected, however, it was almost with feverish passion that he coursed through other fields of knowledge. In the _Ephemerides_--a diary he kept in Strassburg and in which he noted his random thoughts and the books that happened to be engaging him--we can see the range of his reading and the scope of his interests. Occultism, metaphysics, science in many departments, literature ancient and modern, all in turn absorbed his attention and suggest a mental state impatient of the limits of the human faculties--the state of mind which he was afterwards so marvellously to reproduce in his _Faust_.[95] Inspired by the conversation of the medical students who met at the common table, as well as by his own natural bent, he attended the university lectures on chemistry and anatomy, and thus laid a solid foundation for his subsequent original investigations in these sciences. Extensive travels in the surrounding country were among the chief pleasures of his sojourn in Strassburg, and these travels, as was the case with him always, were voyages of discovery. Architecture, machinery, works of engineering, Roman antiquities, the native ballads of the district--on all he turned an equally curious eye, and with such vivid impressions that they remained in his memory after the lapse of half a lifetime. [Footnote 95: "I, too," Goethe wrote in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, "had trodden the path of knowledge, and had early been led to see the vanity of it."]