strength, who feel so overcome by the phenomenon that they undervalue it, and believe that they are able singly to fight against it.  Or there are the weak natures, who think that they are capable of changing the phenomenon to suit themselves.  As they are not in a position to strive against it they retire sullenly defeated.  The story of the fox and the grapes would just express their case, and also an excess of the consciousness of their ‘ego.’  Those are, I think, the resources from which spring contempt of the world:  neither of these cases coincide with yours; you are not young and inexperienced enough for the one, and you are too useful for the other.  You are healthy and sound, of average powers and energy, uncommonly well made in body and mind; of the poetical age, comfortably off, and I should like to know how you have come to despise the world?”

“I hardly know.  The first impulse came perhaps in Russia in early childhood, where I got into the habit of regarding people around me as barbarous—­neither useful nor valuable.”

Schrotter shook his head.

“I have lived for twenty years among a subdued and so-called inferior race, but I have learned to love them instead of despising them.”

“Very likely I have inherited the feeling from my mother, who was very timid of other people, and given to mysticism.”

“Is it not rather your reading?  The unhappy Schopenhauer?”

Wilhelm smiled a little.

“I am above all things an admirer of Schopenhauer, although his explanation of the mysteries of the world through the will is a joke.  What he has written about the main teachings of Buddhism has influenced me very much.”

“I see where you have got to—­’Maja Nirvana’”

Wilhelm nodded.

“That is all a fraud,” Schrotter broke out, so that Bhani, who never saw him violent, looked up frightened.  “I know Indians who have talked endlessly to learned pandits on these questions, and have explained the real ideas of Maja Nirvana to me.  It is incomprehensible that people can misuse words on this subject as they do in Europe.  Nirvana is not what European Buddhists appear to believe—­an absolute negation—­a cessation of consciousness and desire; but, on the contrary, it is the highest consciousness, the expansion of individual being into universal existence.  Here is the Indian seer’s conception:  the most limited individuality cares only for his own ‘ego.’  But in the same measure that he transcends his limitation, the circle of his interest is widened; more actualities and existing phenomena are admitted, and come into sympathy with himself.  All things mingle with and extend his own ‘ego;’ and that can be so widened as to embrace the interests of the whole world, until man can be in as much sympathy with a grain of sand, or the most distant star, and take as much share in the ant, and in the dwellers on Saturn, as in his own stomach and toes.  In this way the