An enemy not less hostile to the enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, presented itself in the indigence of his father, who was compelled to send away the youth on foot to Berlin, to find labour and bread.
At Berlin, Mendelssohn becomes an amanuensis to another poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into the theology, the jurisprudence, and the scholastic philosophy of his people.

Thus, he was as yet no farther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature which was finally to place him among the first polished critics of Germany.
Some unexpected event occurs which gives the first great impulse to the mind of genius.

Mendelssohn received this from the companion of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial but maturer powers.

He was a Polish Jew, expelled from the communion of the orthodox, and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, with more sensibility than fortitude.

But this vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist, and a mathematician.
Mendelssohn, at a distant day, never alluded to him without tears.