ause
it is more hopeless. He has failed in his highest aims--and failed
doubly: because he has learned to content himself with low ones. He
believes that he is teaching useful, although fragmentary truths; that
these may lead to more; that those who follow him may stand on his
shoulders and be considered great. But the crowning TRUTH is as far from
him as ever; and the mass of those who crowd his lecture-room do not
even come for what they can learn, but for the vulgar pleasure of seeing
old beliefs subverted, and old methods exposed. He is humiliated at
having declined on to what seems to him a lower range of knowledge;
still more by the kind of men with whom it has brought him into contact;
and he sees himself sinking into a lower depth, in which such praise as
they can give will repay him. His contempt for himself and them is
making him reckless of consequences, and preparing the way for his
disgrace.

In spite however of his failure Paracelsus has done so much, that Festus
is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own
mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out.
Their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend's self-abasement
as he once combated his too great confidence in himself. He grieves over
what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he
will not regard as due to any deeper cause. But Paracelsus will take no
comfort; and when, finally, he denounces the folly of intellectual
pretensions, and ends with the pathetic words--in part the echo of
Festus' own:--

"... No, no:
Love, hope, fear, faith--these make humanity;
These are its sign and note and character.
And these I have lost!..." (vol. ii. p. 109.)

Festus has no answer to give. He parts from Paracelsus perplexed and
saddened rather than convinced, but with a dawning consciousness of
depths in life, to which his strong but simple soul has no key.

In the fourth scene these depths are more fully and more perplexingly
revealed. Two years more have elapsed. Paracelsus has escaped from Bale,
and is at Colmar, once more confessing himself to Festus, and once more
said to "aspire." But his aspirations are less easy to understand than
formerly, because their aim is less single. The sense of wasted life,
Aprile's warnings, some natural rebound against the continued
intellectual strain have determined him to strive for a