As must happen, Jean Christophe begins with prejudice. At first he overvalues France. Ideas have been impressed upon his mind concerning the artistic, cheerful, liberal-spirited French, and he regards his own Germany as a land full of restriction. His first sight of Paris brings disillusionment; he can see nothing but lies, clamor, and cheating. By degrees, however, he discovers that the soul of a nation is not an obvious and superficial thing, like a paving-stone in the street, but that the observer of a foreign people must dig his way to that soul through a thick stratum of illusion and falsehood. Ere long he weans himself of the habit which leads people to talk of the French, the Italians, the Jews, the Germans, as if members of these respective nations or races were all of a piece, to be classified and docketed in so simple a fashion. Each people has its own measure, its own form, customs, failings, and lies; just as each has its own climate, history, skies, and race; and these things cannot be easily summarized in a phrase or two. As with all experience, our experiences of a country must be built up from within. With words alone we can build nothing but a house of cards. "Truth is the same to all nations, but each nation has its own lies which it speaks of as its idealism. Every member of each nation inhales the appropriate atmosphere of lying idealism from the cradle to the grave, until it becomes the very breath of his life. None but isolated geniuses can free themselves by heroic struggle, during which they stand alone in the free universe of their own thought." We must free ourselves from prejudice if we are to judge freely. There is no other formula; there are no other psychological prescriptions. As with all creative work, we must permeate the material with which we have to deal, must yield ourselves without reserve. In the case of nations as in the case of individual men, he who would know them will find that there is but one science, that of the heart and not of books.