so perfectly formed in all other respects such an important organ as the will should be missing.  His absence of volition was but the result of his perception of the vanity of all earthly ambitions, and his absence of desire the outcome of his contempt for all that was worthless and transitory, his aversion to the ways of the world a tragic foregoing of the hope of ever getting behind it, and reaching the eternal root and significance of the thing itself.

“Why was this German Buddhist not endowed with Haber’s cheerful activity?  What an ideal and crowning flower of manhood would he not have been if he had not only thought but acted!  But am I not desiring the impossible?  Does not the one nature preclude the other?  I fear so.  In order to attack unconcernedly that which lies nearest to us, we must be unable to see beyond, like the bull charging at the red cloak.  He would not do it, if behind the red rag, he saw the man with the sword, and behind the man with the sword the thousand spectators who will not leave the arena till the sharp steel has pierced his heart.  He who sees or divines behind the nearest objects their distant causes, paralyzed by the vision of the endless chain of cause and effect, loses the courage to act.  And inversely, to retain that courage, to strive with pleasure and zeal after earthly things, one must make use of the world and its ordinances, must move the pieces on the chess-board of life with patience, and, according to its puerile rules, attach importance to much that is narrow and paltry, and that is what, in his superior wisdom, the sage will not stoop to do.

“I always come back to this thought.  If the world consisted entirely of Habers the earth would flourish and blossom, there would be abundance of food and money, but our life would be like that of the beasts of the field that graze and are happy when they chew the cud.  If, on the other hand, there were only Eynhardts, our existence would be passed in wandering delightfully, our souls full of perfect peace, through the gardens of the Academos in company with Plato; but the world would starve and die out with this wise and lofty-minded race; unless, indeed, the sun took pity on them, and brought forth grains and fruits without their assistance, and unless a few flighty little women, particularly inaccessible to the higher philosophy, should surprise these transcendental and passionless thinkers in an unguarded moment, and beguile them into committing some slight act of folly.

“To combine in one intelligence Haber’s circumscribed vision, naive self confidence, and enterprising activity with Enyhardt’s sublime idealism and knowledge of good and evil is outside the range of possibility.  And which of the two is of the greater benefit to the world?  Which of them raises mankind to a higher level of development?  Which of them best fulfills his purpose as a human being?  Whose point of view of the world and of life is the more correct?  Which of the two would I set up as a model before the child whom Eynhardt snatched from death at the price of his own body, and in whom his life as it were finds its continuation?  My old friend Pyrrhon, thou who hearkened, two thousand two hundred years before my day, to the profound wisdom of the Brahmins, I can but answer in thy words, ’Uden horizo,’—­I do not decide.”