urvival depended on it; at other
moments he seemed to bring me peace. One day I recalled as vividly as
though it were taking place again that last time I had been with him;
I seemed once more to be listening to the calm yet earnest talk ranging
over so many topics, politics and government, economics and science and
religion. I did not yet grasp the synthesis he had made of them all,
but I saw them now all focussed in him elements he had drawn from
human lives and human experiences. I think it was then I first felt the
quickenings of a new life to be born in travail and pain.... Wearied,
yet exalted, I sank down on a stone bench and gazed out at the little
island of Santa Cruz afloat on the shimmering sea.

I have mentioned my inability to depict the terrible struggle that went
on in my soul. It seems strange that Nietzsche--that most ruthless
of philosophers to the romantic mind!--should express it for me. "The
genius of the heart, from contact with which every man goes away richer,
not 'blessed' and overcome,... but richer himself, fresher to himself
than before, opened up, breathed upon and sounded by a thawing wind;
more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more bruised; but full of hopes
which as yet lack names, full of a new will and striving, full of a new
unwillingness and counterstriving."...

Such was my experience with Hermann Krebs. How keenly I remember that
new unwillingness and counter-striving! In spite of the years it has not
wholly died down, even to-day....

Almost coincident with these quickenings of which I have spoken was the
consciousness of a hunger stronger than the craving for bread and meat,
and I began to meditate on my ignorance, on the utter inadequacy and
insufficiency of my early education, on my neglect of the new learning
during the years that had passed since I left Harvard. And I remembered
Krebs's words--that we must "reeducate ourselves." What did I know? A
system of law, inherited from another social order, that was utterly
unable to cope with the complexities and miseries and injustices of a
modern industrial world. I had spent my days in mastering an inadequate
and archaic code--why? in order that I might learn how to evade it? This
in itself condemned it. What did I know of life? of the shining universe
that surrounded me? What did I know of the insect and the flower, of the
laws that moved the planets and made incandescent the suns? of the human
body, of the human soul and its i