myself utterly unable to describe that struggle in which he seemed to be fighting as against myself for my confidence; that process whereby he gradually grew as real to me as though he still lived—­until I could almost hear his voice and see his smile.  At moments I resisted wildly, as though my survival depended on it; at other moments he seemed to bring me peace.  One day I recalled as vividly as though it were taking place again that last time I had been with him; I seemed once more to be listening to the calm yet earnest talk ranging over so many topics, politics and government, economics and science and religion.  I did not yet grasp the synthesis he had made of them all, but I saw them now all focussed in him elements he had drawn from human lives and human experiences.  I think it was then I first felt the quickenings of a new life to be born in travail and pain....  Wearied, yet exalted, I sank down on a stone bench and gazed out at the little island of Santa Cruz afloat on the shimmering sea.

I have mentioned my inability to depict the terrible struggle that went on in my soul.  It seems strange that Nietzsche—­that most ruthless of philosophers to the romantic mind!—­should express it for me.  “The genius of the heart, from contact with which every man goes away richer, not ‘blessed’ and overcome,....but richer himself, fresher to himself than before, opened up, breathed upon and sounded by a thawing wind; more uncertain, perhaps, more delicate, more bruised; but full of hopes which as yet lack names, full of a new will and striving, full of a new unwillingness and counterstriving."....

Such was my experience with Hermann Krebs.  How keenly I remember that new unwillingness and counter-striving!  In spite of the years it has not wholly died down, even to-day....

Almost coincident with these quickenings of which I have spoken was the consciousness of a hunger stronger than the craving for bread and meat, and I began to meditate on my ignorance, on the utter inadequacy and insufficiency of my early education, on my neglect of the new learning during the years that had passed since I left Harvard.  And I remembered Krebs’s words—­that we must “reeducate ourselves.”  What did I know?  A system of law, inherited from another social order, that was utterly unable to cope with the complexities and miseries and injustices of a modern industrial world.  I had spent my days in mastering an inadequate and archaic code—­why? in order that I might learn how to evade it?  This in itself condemned it.  What did I know of life? of the shining universe that surrounded me?  What did I know of the insect and the flower, of the laws that moved the planets and made incandescent the suns? of the human body, of the human soul and its instincts?  Was this knowledge acquired at such cost of labour and life and love by my fellow-men of so little worth to me that I could ignore it? declare that it had no significance for me? no bearing on my life and conduct?