Fortunately, he did not allow his deeds of brotherly love to be darkened by the shadow of these and kindred thoughts.  He brought forward reasons which always ended by triumphing over his cold doubts.  Misery was possibly the outcome of inexorable natural laws, but then was not compassion the same?  The poor were poor under the pressure of some irresistible force, but did not the charitable act under the same pressure?  Moreover, was Wilhelm so sure that he himself was better equipped for the race of life than those unfortunates who went under because they chose a trade for which they were neither mentally nor physically competent, or because, from laziness or obstinacy, they insisted on remaining in Berlin, where nobody wanted them, when a few miles off they might have found all the conditions conducive to their prosperity?  How could he know whether he would have been capable of earning his living if his father had not left him a plentifully-spread table?  In the rooms that contained so little furniture and so many emaciated human beings, into which his charitable zeal led him every day, he pictured himself, pale and thin, without food, without books; and although he had the harmless vanity to believe that privation and penury would affect him less deeply than the poor devils he visited, the idea that he saw his own face before him, as it might have been had he not had the good luck to be his father’s heir opened his hand still wider, and added to the money words of sympathy and comfort, which afforded the recipients—­unless they were utterly hardened—­as much pleasure as the donation itself.

Beside his almsgiving, he now had another occupation which took up all his surplus time.  Schrotter had not let the suggestion drop which he made at Dorfling’s dinner-party, and had persuaded Wilhelm so long that he finally rouse himself to attempt an account of the ways and means by which the human mind has freed itself of its grossest errors.  It was to be entitled “A History of Human Ignorance,” and promised to be a most original work.  He would endeavor to show what idea people had had of the universe at various periods, how they explained the phenomena of nature, their connection, their causes and effects.  He would begin with the childish superstitions of the savages, and continuing through the so-called learned systems of the ancients and of the Middle Ages, would bring his history up to the theories of contemporary scientists.  He would demonstrate the psychological causes of the fact that man, at a certain stage of intellectual development, must necessarily fall into certain errors, and by the aid of what experiments, experiences, and conclusions he had come gradually to recognize them as such.  How the fresh interpretation of a single phenomenon would overturn, at one blow, a number of other phenomena hitherto considered entirely satisfactory, how prevailing scientific theories, instead of assisting the fearless observer or discoverer,