First, and in the person of Jarno, enters the Critical Understanding. True as steel, cold and keen as steel also, antipathetic to all sentiment, clear and decisive partly by what he has and partly by what he has not, Jarno offers with unsparing rigor to shear away Wilhelm's illusions, not seeing that in these very illusions runs an artery rich in his reddest life-blood. Critical understanding, the disenchanter,--light without heat or color,--begins at a certain period in nobly imagining and impassioned youth to break through the cloudy glories, and shame all with its cold glare. That sudden skeptic shame! Do you know it, reader? Do you remember moments when all that had glorified life seemed suddenly to stand before you a detected impostor, a beggar playing king, and now stripped to his rags? Ah, me! and how pathetically old and wise the neophyte becomes all at once! He will be fooled no longer, he! Love, friendship, philanthropy,--he has looked under the words, and found all they covered, namely, nothing. Henceforth he will hunt sentiment out of him, as it were a wolf. Henceforth he will measure out his life by hand, and be purely--and barrenly--"reasonable." Unhappy, could he succeed. A mere life of the understanding is just one degree better than idiocy. Sweep out imagination, and all the angels go with it. To freeze the heated geysers of the soul? It were to freeze the core of the world. Better to be nobly moonstruck than turned into a pillar of salt, even were it Attic salt. Better to be Don Quixote than a very archangel Sancho. And yet unhappy is the nobly impassioned and imagining soul that can never discriminate, never distinguish between the central suggestions of the soul and the chance directions these may have taken. It is he of all men who needs just this, discrimination. Is there any tragedy like that of Don Quixote? A god blinded by his own light! An Olympian charging upon windmills, while a toad squats aside and grins at the spectacle! The ludicrousness is but the last sting of the tragedy. On the whole, critical understanding must have heed. The divine mania of the soul must listen even to this Sancho with his wise saws. Hard it is for the higher to become pupil of the lower, to accept and use its very contempt, and yet forbear to learn contempt of itself, stooping only to conquer. Yet even this must be. Heat is divine, but cold also is necessary. The cloudy glories of rich impassioned spirits, the vapors that float, scarlet and gold, in their heavens, must strike against the icy mountain-tops of common-sense, that the cold may condense them into fruitful rain. Hence thunder, lightning, storm, and wild commotion in the soul; but hence harvest also. The first great inward struggle is this between heat and cold; and where the heats are tropical, the collision is violent. Yet these contraries _must_ both work into the great economies of life.