t to be
a community which is striving to educate and enlighten its members on
a scale so magnificently out of proportion to its size that it must
put all larger cities to shame. This being so, I presume I may take it
for granted that in a quarter where so much is _done_ for the things
of which I wish to speak, people must also _think_ a good deal about
them. In my account of the conversation already mentioned, I shall be
able to make myself completely understood only to those among my
audience who will be able to guess what I can do no more than suggest,
who will supply what I am compelled to omit, and who, above all, need
but to be reminded and not taught.

Listen, therefore, ladies and gentlemen, while I recount my harmless
experience and the less harmless conversation between the two
gentlemen whom, so far, I have not named.

Let us now imagine ourselves in the position of a young student--that
is to say, in a position which, in our present age of bewildering
movement and feverish excitability, has become an almost impossible
one. It is necessary to have lived through it in order to believe that
such careless self-lulling and comfortable indifference to the moment,
or to time in general, are possible. In this condition I, and a friend
about my own age, spent a year at the University of Bonn on the
Rhine,--it was a year which, in its complete lack of plans and
projects for the future, seems almost like a dream to me now--a dream
framed, as it were, by two periods of growth. We two remained quiet
and peaceful, although we were surrounded by fellows who in the main
were very differently disposed, and from time to time we experienced
considerable difficulty in meeting and resisting the somewhat too
pressing advances of the young men of our own age. Now, however, that
I can look upon the stand we had to take against these opposing
forces, I cannot help associating them in my mind with those checks we
are wont to receive in our dreams, as, for instance, when we imagine
we are able to fly and yet feel ourselves held back by some
incomprehensible power.

I and my friend had many reminiscences in common, and these dated from
the period of our boyhood upwards. One of these I must relate to you,
since it forms a sort of prelude to the harmless experience already
mentioned. On the occasion of a certain journey up the Rhine, which we
had made together one summer, it happened that he and I independently
conceived the very same