He completed his education at Erlangen with the study of natural science.
In this way we see that just as advancing natural science was preparing the way for a doctrine of physical evolution, so advancing historical research was leading to the application of a similar idea to the collective human life.
In 1817 a Roman Catholic theological faculty was added, with a seminary called the Konvikt, and there are now also faculties of law, medicine, philosophy, political economy and natural science.
Hertz himself gave an admirable account of the significance of his discoveries in a lecture on the relations between light and electricity, delivered before the German Society for the Advancement of Natural Science and Medicine at Heidelberg in September 1889.
But, from the national distrust of system, it has not been elaborated into a consistent metaphysic, but is rather traceable as a tendency harmonizing with the spirit of natural science.