It was characteristic that he found the prelections on philosophy and logic specially tedious and distasteful.

Of God and the world he thought he knew as much as his teacher, and the scholastic analysis of the processes of thought seemed to him only the deadening of the faculties which he had received from nature.

Of these dreary hours in the lecture-rooms the biting comments of Faust and Mephistopheles on university studies in general are the lively reminiscence.
But while he was putting in a perfunctory attendance at lectures, his education was proceeding in another school--the school which, as in his after years he so insistently testified, affords the only real discipline for life--the world of real men and women.[19] And the lessons of this school he took in with a zest that well illustrates what he called his "chameleon" nature.

Within a year the "little, odd, coddled boy" who had left his father's house was transformed into a fashionable Leipzig youth who went even beyond his models.

His home-made suit, which had passed muster in Frankfort, but which excited ridicule in Leipzig, was exchanged for a costume which went to the other extreme of dandyism.