This passion for truth in her own thinking was the origin of her social value. Its stimulus to others was immediate, and her recognition through it of the important things in life made her detect at once those people and things that were original and valuable in themselves. "Rahel's most comprehensive significance," writes Ellen Key, "lay in augmenting the productiveness, humanity and culture of her time by herself everywhere seeking and teaching others to seek the truth; by everywhere encouraging them to manifest their own culture; by imparting to others her profound way of looking at religion, men and women, literature and art; by judging everything according to its intrinsic value, not according to its deficiencies; by everywhere understanding, because she loved, and giving life, because she believed in liberty." Think always, ceaselessly!--this was Rahel's cry. This, she said, is the only duty, the only happiness. To a young friend she wrote, begging that he keep ploughing through things afresh, telling him that he "must always have the courage to hurt himself with questioning and doubts; to destroy the most comfortable and beautiful edifice of thought--one that might have stood for life--if honesty demands it." And so, having thought out things in the most utter freedom, unhampered by old preconceptions, and finally unafraid of the starkness of the truths which she faced, she let nothing prescribed be her unchallenged guide or stand as a substitute for her own vigor and hardness of thinking. This is why she said that she was revived by downright brutality, after being wearied by insincerity. A virtue, so called, had to give a very good accounting of itself to Rahel. She demanded that it answer a certain test before it could be called a piece of goodness. For instance, in many cases she recognized in "performance of duty" mere acquiescence--a laziness of mind which does not bestir itself to ask what right this duty has to impose itself. Patience to her was often lack of courage to seize upon a situation and change it to suit the imperative demand to express oneself. "The more I see and meditate upon the strivings of this world," wrote Rahel, "the more insane it appears to me day by day not to live according to one's inmost heart. To do so has such a bad name, because simulacra of it are in circulation." Of these "simulacra" we are familiar in every age--the amazing antics of certain self-styled "radicals," the unaccountable manifestations of those who, while professing liberality of view, seem to have no standards of values in their extravagances of living. Rahel could understand every nature except the insincere and unnatural.