“I cannot,” he writes, “give any metaphysical credo. For, in the first place, I will never deceive myself by saying _I know that which I do not know_—which, at the most, I can imagine or hope. In the second place, I will never confine myself within the limits of any belief. For I hope to develop until my last day; I wish to reserve for myself unlimited freedom of intellectual transformation and renewal. I have many gods in my Pantheon; but my chief godhead is _Liberty_. At present I do not separate the essence of the human soul from that of the divine spirit, of which the former is a part. But I hardly believe that this divine spirit fills the universe. It _seeks_, certainly, to fill the world and guide it; but nothing indicates that it will succeed. Even in this regard I reserve space for liberty. Pure monism does not satisfy me. I am more inclined to a dualism such as the ancient Empedocles believed in. I have an unbounded admiration for the pre-Socratic philosophers, the sages of Ionia and Magna Graecia. Indeed my first work, written at Rome, twenty years ago, was a drama with Empedocles as hero. The struggle between two principles is manifest to me in the whole history of the world, material as well as moral history. The question is whether there is not a _third_ principle, in which the other two are included or harmonized. A trinity therefore—it is singular how this form forces itself upon the human mind—but a trinity very different from the Christian conception of the trinity, since it comprises a father and two striving brothers: a triad that approaches the antique cosmogony of which we find a reflection in Hesiod, in _Chaos_, _Gaea_, and _Eros_. If I live I shall go deeper into ancient thought. Those ancient philosophers lived in more intimate contact with nature than any of their successors, and, moreover, collected the thousand-year-old wisdom of the whole Orient.” Besides this personal utterance of Rolland himself, a French friend of his, intimate with his thought, has given me permission to communicate the following statement of the trend of Rolland’s thought: