o, enters the Critical Understanding.
True as steel, cold and keen as steel also, antipathetic to all
sentiment, clear and decisive partly by what he has and partly by what
he has not, Jarno offers with unsparing rigor to shear away Wilhelm's
illusions, not seeing that in these very illusions runs an artery rich
in his reddest life-blood.

Critical understanding, the disenchanter,--light without heat or
color,--begins at a certain period in nobly imagining and impassioned
youth to break through the cloudy glories, and shame all with its cold
glare. That sudden skeptic shame! Do you know it, reader? Do you
remember moments when all that had glorified life seemed suddenly to
stand before you a detected impostor, a beggar playing king, and now
stripped to his rags? Ah, me! and how pathetically old and wise the
neophyte becomes all at once! He will be fooled no longer, he! Love,
friendship, philanthropy,--he has looked under the words, and found all
they covered, namely, nothing. Henceforth he will hunt sentiment out of
him, as it were a wolf. Henceforth he will measure out his life by hand,
and be purely--and barrenly--"reasonable."

Unhappy, could he succeed. A mere life of the understanding is just one
degree better than idiocy. Sweep out imagination, and all the angels go
with it. To freeze the heated geysers of the soul? It were to freeze the
core of the world. Better to be nobly moonstruck than turned into a
pillar of salt, even were it Attic salt. Better to be Don Quixote than a
very archangel Sancho.

And yet unhappy is the nobly impassioned and imagining soul that can
never discriminate, never distinguish between the central suggestions of
the soul and the chance directions these may have taken. It is he of all
men who needs just this, discrimination. Is there any tragedy like that
of Don Quixote? A god blinded by his own light! An Olympian charging
upon windmills, while a toad squats aside and grins at the spectacle!
The ludicrousness is but the last sting of the tragedy. On the whole,
critical understanding must have heed. The divine mania of the soul must
listen even to this Sancho with his wise saws. Hard it is for the
higher to become pupil of the lower, to accept and use its very
contempt, and yet forbear to learn contempt of itself, stooping only to
conquer. Yet even this must be. Heat is divine, but cold also is
necessary. The cloudy glories of rich impassioned spirits, the vapors
that float, scarlet and