"It is only towards you that I am so communicative," answered the father, "I control my impatience in the presence of others and especially before my son, but much as I must love him, I cannot participate in your hopes. Were he only hasty and inconsiderate, all might be well for I have been so too, I would even look favourably upon his extravagant, overstrained religious zeal and all connected with it; for early in life my own heart singularly experienced these feelings; if with all this deep-rooted self will, this violent excess in every thing, he would only add an inclination to activity, if he would but instruct himself, if he would occupy himself in any way. I feel too well that he presents but a disfigured resemblance of a part of my own youth, but inwardly he is most unlike me, and in some measure inimically opposed to me; thus unhappily is the neglected education of his childhood avenged. You know well my old friend how much and almost how culpably he was beloved by my deceased wife, how extravagantly she admired every idea, impulse and peculiarity of the child, and that Abbé his tutor also, who only excited his imagination and nourished it with legends and miracles; his youthful mind was thus dazzled and rendered incapable of discerning truth and reality, it accustomed him to indulge freely in all the emotions of his heart and to consider them unerring and most exalted. Imperceptibly a contempt for all, who did not coincide with him, crept into his mind, he looked upon them as cold and perverse, and in his zealous hatred, he believed himself infinitely superior to them. I was too weak, too irresolute to remedy the evil while it was yet time, I flattered myself, that it would not take root so easily, and when at last my suffering wife, whose feelings I ever feared to distress, died in giving birth to my youngest child, it was too late." "All that may be true," rejoined his friend, "but not so bad however as you consider it, stupidity and madness are alone incurable; a vein of good runs through all really excitable natures, and the life of these irritable and violent men is spent in continual struggles between good and evil, so that the best part may be extracted and shine forth glorified." "You speak," said the Counsellor, "like a physician and chemist, you deny that the soul can appropriate to itself immutable perversities which afterwards constitute its life."