I went at once to the library, and Unger selected the books which seemed best adapted to give me further instruction.
I returned with Champollion's Grammaire Hieroglyphique, Lepsius's Lettre a Rosellini, and unfortunately with some misleading writings by Seyffarth.
How often afterward, returning in the evening from some entertainment, I have buried myself in the grammar and tried to write hieroglyphics.
True, I strove still more frequently and persistently to follow the philosopher Lotze.
Obedient to a powerful instinct, my untrained intellect had sought to read the souls of men.

Now I learned through Lotze to recognize the body as the instrument to which the emotions of the soul, the harmonies and discords of the mental and emotional life, owe their origin.
I intended later to devote myself earnestly to the study of physiology, for without it Lotze could be but half understood; and from physiologists emanated the conflict which at that time so deeply stirred the learned world.
In Gottingen especially the air seemed, as it were, filled with physiological and other questions of the natural sciences.
In that time of the most sorrowful reaction the political condition of Germany was so wretched that any discussion concerning it was gladly avoided.

I do not remember having attended a single debate on that topic in the circles of the students with which I was nearly connected.
But the great question "Materialism or Antimaterialism" still agitated the Georgia Augusta, in whose province the conflict had assumed still sharper forms, owing to Rudolf Wagner's speech during the convention of the Guttingen naturalists three years prior to my entrance.
Carl Vogt's "Science and Bigotry" exerted a powerful influence, owing to the sarcastic tone in which the author attacked his calmer adversary.
In the honest conviction of profound knowledge, the clever, vigorous champion of materialism endeavoured to brand the opponents of his dogmas with the stigma of absurdity, and those who flattered themselves with the belief that they belonged to the ranks of the "strong-minded" followed his standard.
Hegel's influence was broken, Schelling's idealism had been thrust aside.

The solid, easily accessible fare of the materialists was especially relished by those educated in the natural sciences, and Vogt's maxim, that thought stands in a similar relation to the brain as the gall to the liver and the excretions of the other organs, met with the greater approval the more confidently and wittily it was promulgated.

The philosopher could not help asserting that the nature of the soul could be disclosed neither by the scalpel nor the microscope; yet the discoveries of the naturalist, which had led to the perception of the relation existing between the psychical and material life seemed to give the most honest, among whom Carl Vogt held the first rank; a right to uphold their dogmas.
Materialism versus Antimaterialism was the subject under discussion in the learned circles of Germany.