Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be delivered? Our letter of academic membership will open the doors to us, if we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has commenced his lecture. With astonishing subtlety and penetration he discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de Abano, but not as yet fully solved,--"_an caput sit factum propter cerebrum vel oculos_" (whether the head was formed for the sake of the brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us into one of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on the cross.[28] A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning deduces the distinction between _universalia ante rem_ and _universalia in re_. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a passage in the pandects.--Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly. Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:-- I have, alas! Philosophy, Med'cine, and Jurisprudence too, And to my cost Theology, With ardent labor studied through. And here I stand, with all my lore, Poor fool, no wiser than before. and if you add like him, Hence have I now applied myself to magic, we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face, even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, hoary-headed fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct--as direct as the winding lanes permit--to that great magician who has taken up his abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if we are disappointed there,--well, then _you_, if you so choose, can quench your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure. _I_ shall go into a monastery, seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray, scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,--stare at it and never cease, year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed, then, is it not?....