The impressions must have been deep, since, writing in advanced age, he describes their personal appearance and their different idiosyncrasies with a minuteness which is at the same time a remarkable testimony to his precocious powers of observation.

What is interesting in these intimacies as throwing light on Goethe's early characteristics is, that all these persons were of mature age, and all of them more or less eccentric in their habits and ways of thinking.
"Even in God I discover defects," was the remark of one of them to his youthful listener--to whom he had been communicating his views on the world in general.

In the company of these elders, with such or kindred opinions, Goethe was early familiarised with the variability of human judgments on fundamental questions.

And he laid the experience to heart, for on no point in the conduct of life does he insist with greater emphasis than the folly of expecting others to think as ourselves.
The method of Goethe's education was not such as to compensate for the lack of moral discipline which has already been noted.

With the exception of a brief interval, he received instruction at home, either directly from his father or from tutors under his superintendence.
Thus he missed both the steady drill of school life and the influence of companions of his own age which might have made him more of a boy and less of a premature man.[9] It is Goethe's own expressed opinion that the object of education should be to foster tastes rather than to communicate knowledge.