The immediate result of this awakening is told in "Centre of Indifference"--_i.e._, indifference to oneself, one's own feelings, and even to fate. It is the transition from subjective to objective interests, from eating one's own heart out to a sense of the wide and living world by which one is surrounded. It is the same process which, just about this time, Robert Browning was describing in _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Once more Teufelsdroeckh travels, but this time how differently! Instead of being absorbed by the haunting shadow of himself, he sees the world full of vital interests--cities of men, tilled fields, books, battlefields. The great questions of the world--the true meanings alike of peace and war--claim his interest. The great men, whether Goethe or Napoleon, do their work before his astonished eyes. "Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows, over the many-coloured world, and pertinently enough note what is passing there." He has reached--strangely enough through self-assertion--the centre of indifference to self, and of interest in other people and things. And the supreme lesson of it all is the value of _efficiency_. Napoleon "was a Divine Missionary, though unconscious of it; and preached, through the cannon's throat, that great doctrine, _La carriere ouverte aux talens_ (the tools to him that can handle them)." This bracing doctrine carries us at once into The Everlasting Yea. It is not enough that a man pass from the morbid and self-centered mood to an interest in the outward world that surrounds him. That might transform him simply into a curious but heartless dilettante, a mere tourist of the spirit, whose sole desire is to see and to take notes. But that could never satisfy Carlyle; for that is but self-indulgence in its more refined form of the lust of the eyes. It was not for this that the Everlasting No had set Teufelsdroeckh wailing, nor for this that he had risen up in wrath and bidden defiance to fear. From his temptation in the wilderness the Son of Man must come forth, not to wander open-mouthed about the plain, but to work his way "into the higher sunlit slopes of that Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only."