Man comes to the pass where all experience seems exhausted. Wherever he go, whatever he see, all is old and wearyingly familiar. Most people explain this by saying that they really know everything, and that from what they have experienced they can infer all experience. This phase of the exhaustion of life usually comes to a man between thirty-five and forty--the best period, according to Karamzin. Not seeing anything new, the individual assumes he is completely matured and has the right to judge of everything. Knowing what has been he can forecast what will be. But Karamzin was mistaken about the best period, and the "mature" people are mistaken about the "nothing new can happen." The fact of spiritual stagnation should not be made the ground for judging all life's possibilities from known possibilities. On the contrary, such stagnation should prove that however rich and multifarious the past may have been, it has not exhausted a tittle of the whole possibilities. From that which has been it is impossible to infer what will be. Moreover, it is unnecessary--except, perhaps, to give us a sense of our full maturity and let us enjoy all the charms of the best period of life, so eloquently described by Karamzin. The temptation is not overwhelming. So that, if man is under the necessity of enduring a period of arrest and stagnation, and until such time as life re-starts is doomed to meditation, would it not be better to use this meditating _interregnum_ for a directly opposite purpose from the one indicated: that is to say, for the purpose of finding in our past signs which tell us that the future has every right to be anything whatsoever, like or utterly unlike the past. Such signs, given a good will to find them, may be seen in plenty. At times one comes to the conclusion that the natural connection of phenomena, as hitherto observed, is not at all inevitable for the future, and that miracles which so far have seemed impossible, may come to seem possible, even natural, far more natural than that loathsome law of sequence, the law of the regularity of phenomena. We are bored stiff with regularity and sequence--confess it, you also, you men of science. At the mere thought that, however we may think, we can get no further than the acknowledgment of the old regularity, an invincible disgust to any kind of mental work overcomes us. To discover another law--still another--when already we have far more than we can do with! Surely if there is any will-to-think left in us, it is established in the supposition that the mind cannot and must not have any bounds, any limits; and that the theory of knowledge, which is based on the _history_ of knowledge and on a few very doubtful assumptions, is only a piece of property belonging to a certain caste, and has nothing to do with us others_--und die Natur zuletzt sich doch ergründe._ What a mad impatience seizes us at times when we realise that we shall never fathom the great mystery! Every individual in