that she must leave the rest to guidance
from above: with this exception I was literally cut off from the
counsel and instruction of others. In this period, when studies which
ambition at times led me to prosecute zealously--or emptiness and
satiety, the inevitable companions of my way of living--brought me
nearer to the real meaning of life and eternity, it was in old-world
philosophies, uncomprehended writings of Hegel, and particularly in
Spinoza's seeming mathematical clearness, that I sought for peace of
mind in that which the human understanding cannot comprehend. But it
was loneliness that first led me to reflect on these things
persistently, when I went to Kniephof, after my mother's death, five
or six years ago. Though at first my views did not materially change
at Kniephof, yet conscience began to be more audible in the solitude,
and to represent that many a thing was wrong which I had before
regarded as permissible. Yet my struggle for insight was still
confined to the circle of the understanding, and led me, while reading
such writings as those of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer, only
deeper into the blind alley of doubt.

I was firmly convinced that God has denied to man the possibility of
true knowledge; that it is presumption to claim to understand the will
and plans of the Lord of the World; that the individual must await in
submission the judgment that his Creator will pass upon him in death,
and that the will of God becomes known to us on earth solely through
conscience, which He has given us as a special organ for feeling our
way through the gloom of the world. That I found no peace in these
views I need not say. Many an hour have I spent in disconsolate
depression, thinking that my existence and that of others is
purposeless and unprofitable--perchance only a casual product of
creation, coming and going like dust from rolling wheels.

About four years ago I came into close companionship, for the first
time since my school-days, with Moritz Blankenburg, and found in him,
what I had never had till then in my life, a friend; but the warm zeal
of his love strove in vain to give me by persuasion and discussion
what I lacked--faith. But through Moritz I made acquaintance with the
Triglaf family and the social circle around it, and found in it people
who made me ashamed that, with the scanty light of my understanding, I
had undertaken to investigate things which such superior intellects
accepted as t