believed in fetishes, but he could not fully comprehend that the so-called enlightened sincerely believed in all these. He looked into his own mind and believed he understood all minds. He judged all minds by his own. At times, in his wanderings through the streets, brandishing his cane and smiling cynically, he said to himself that either he was an imbecile and did not possess the ordinary faculties of a human being or the world was peopled with idiots. There could be no compromise between the two; either he saw clearly or the millions of struggling bigots saw the truth. With the sublime self-assurance of youth he knew he was right and laughed pitifully at the erring souls around him. Yes, he understood Voltaire. Who would not laugh at the sight of an army of children dressed up in clothes of grown men and women? Who would not scoff at the prattling babes imitating the language of their elders? The children must have some things to play with or to fight over, he mused. Religion or War? Since the sound of cannon had ceased, the children of men now engaged with other playthings. When everything else fails religion supplies the demand for a universal plaything. War and Religion—he almost preferred the former. The ugly spectacle of Hamburg’s factionalism disgusted him. And whenever strife is ripe—he beheld all history at a glance—after every great war, after every economic upheaval, after every revolution, people turned against his race. He now understood why his people were called chosen. His thoughts soon turned to Greece as one tired of a long winter in the north turns to the sunny south. Greece of old was the sunshine in his dreary existence. He could not understand the petty strife of the theology of his day but he grasped the meaning of Old Greece. The one was sordid prose, the other idyllic poetry. Prose must speak in exact terms, poetry may be fantastic. He yearned for deities rising from ocean waves, for a god on Olympus, for goddesses with harps and rainbows and vessels of nectar. The gods of Hamburg savoured of incense and garlic.