t he thought, felt, imagined, dreamed, and
fancied--this very fact embittered for him the fruit which he was
obliged at last to pluck from the tree of knowledge.

Who can escape the conflict with the outer world? Even our friend is
drawn into this strife; reluctantly he submits to contradiction by
experience and by life; and since, after a long struggle, he succeeds
not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or
that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the
actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus
far seemed real to him is phantasy.

Yet even here the individuality and the energy of his spirit reveals
itself to be worthy of admiration. Despite all the fulness of his life,
despite so strong a joy of living, despite noble inward talents and
honorable spiritual desires and purposes, he feels himself wounded by
the world and defrauded of his greatest treasures. Henceforth he can in
experience nowhere find what had constituted his joy for so many years,
and what had even been the inmost content of his life; yet he does not
consume himself in idle lamentations, of which we know so many in the
prose and verse of others, but he resolves upon counter-action. He
proclaims war on all that cannot be demonstrated in reality; first and
foremost, therefore, on Platonic love, then on all dogmatizing
philosophy, especially its two extremes of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism.
Furthermore, he works implacably against religious fanaticism, and
against all that to reason appears eccentric.

But he is at once overwhelmed with anxiety lest he go too far, lest he
himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle
against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are
accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism--musty pedantry,
provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug
complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied to all
these unclean spirits, whose name is Legion.

Herein he proceeds in an absolutely natural manner, without preconceived
purpose or self-consciousness. He stands before the dilemma of the
conceivable and the real, and, as he must advise moderation to control
or to unite the two, he must hold himself in check, and must be
many-sided, since he wishes to be just.

He had long been attracted by the pure, rational uprightness of noble
Englishmen, and by their influence in the mor