The individual has been emancipated. No longer satisfied with the place assigned to him, no longer content to follow the plough across his father's field, the young man released from serfdom, freed from villenage, for the first time sees the whole world lie open before him. Everything seems to have become suddenly possible; the word impossible has lost its meaning now that the drumstick in the soldier's hand may, by a series of rapid changes, turn into a marshal's baton or even a sceptre. The powers of the individual, however, have not kept pace with his possibilities; of the hundred thousand to whom the road is suddenly thrown open, only one can reach the desired goal, and who is to assure the individual that he is that one? Inordinate desire is necessarily accompanied by inordinate melancholy. Nor is it every one, without exception, that can take part in the great wild race. Those who for some reason or other feel themselves bound up with the old order of things, and the finer, less thick-skinned natures, the men who are rather dreamers than workers, find that they are excluded; they stand aside or emigrate, they are thrown back upon themselves, and their self-communings increase their self-centredness and thereby augment their capacity for suffering. It is the most highly developed organisms which suffer most. Add to this, that the collapse of the old order releases the individual from a wholesome pressure which has kept him within certain social bounds and prevented his thinking himself of too much importance. Now self-idolatry is possible, wherever the power of self-restraint is not as strong as the control formerly exercised by society. And at the same time that everything has become possible, it seems as if everything had become permissible. All the power which the individual had given up, had voluntarily transferred to his God or his king, he now reclaims. Just as he no longer raises his hat to the gilded chariot for whose gilding he himself has paid, so he no longer bows to any prohibition whose human origin he can plainly discern. To all such he has an answer ready, an answer which is a question, a terrible question, one that is the beginning of all human knowledge and all human freedom, the question "Why?" It is plain that even these aberrations of fancy upon which we have just dwelt, these excursions into the domain of unnatural passions and unnatural crimes, are only a symptom; they are one of the mistakes made in the great, momentous struggle of the individual to assert himself.