He will not purchase the right to command at the price of obedience. To him a clock represents the quintessence of torture. To bind himself to tear his mood into fragments when the clock strikes, as the labourer, the man of business, and the official must, is to him to deprive himself of the one good thing which life with all its tribulations offers, namely, independence. He is a stranger among his fellow-men; they do not feel as he feels, he does not believe what they believe. They appear to him so tainted with superstition, prejudices, hypocrisy, and social untruthfulness, that he shrinks from contact with them. At the close of the eighteenth century France was not orthodox, but it had not emancipated itself from the belief in God and in a future existence. Obermann does not share these beliefs; his is an essentially modern spirit; his philosophy is the scientific philosophy of the nineteenth century; he is a warm, convinced humanitarian, and has as little belief in a happier existence after death as in a personal God. The question of religion is discussed from various points of view in his letters. We already find the indignant refutation of the theory that atheism is the result of wickedness. They who believe in the Bible, says Obermann, maintain that it is only men's evil passions which prevent them from being Christians; the atheist might with equal justice assert that only the bad man is a Christian, since it is only the Christian who requires the help of phantasms to restrain him from stealing, lying, and murdering, and who endorses the theory that it would not be worth while leading an upright life if there were no hell. He attempts to explain the psychical origin of the belief in the immortality of the individual. The majority of human beings, restless and unhappy, live in hope that next hour, that to-morrow, and, finally, that in a life to come, they may attain the happiness they desire. To the argument that this belief is, at any rate, a consolation, he replies, that its being a consolation to the unhappy, is but one reason the more for doubting its truth. Men so readily credit what they wish to believe. Suppose one of the old sophists to have succeeded in making a pupil believe that by following certain directions for ten days he would be assured of invulnerability, eternal youth, &c.--the belief would doubtless be very agreeable to the pupil in question, but none the better founded for that. When asked what becomes of motion, mind, and soul, which are incorruptible, Obermann replies: "When the fire on your hearth goes out, its light, its warmth, its force forsake it, and it passes into another world, where it will be eternally rewarded if it has warmed your feet and eternally punished if it has burned your slippers."