explanation, to the effect that Paul was a philosopher, too, in his own
way. Early misfortunes, which mocked the resolutions of a will never
very strong, had played into a habit of thinking, and brought him to the
conviction that every movement or change in the moral world, not less
than in the physical, is the result of a cause which runs back through
endless generations to the first man, and even beyond him. Paul was, in
short, a fatalist; not of that kind which romance writers feign in order
to make the character work through a gloomy presentiment of his own
destiny, but merely a believer in a universal original decree, the
workings of which we never know until the effects are seen. A fatalist
of this kind almost every man is, less or more, in some mood or another;
only, to save himself from being a puppet, moved by springs or drawn by
strings, he generally contrives to except his _will_ from the scheme of
the iron-bound necessity. But Paul would permit of no such exception.
The will, with him, was merely the _motive in action_; and as he
compelled you to admit that no thought is, in man's experience, ever
called into being, only developed from prior conditions, and that, even
as to an idea, the doctrine _Nihil nisi ex ovo_ is true, and therefore
that no man can manufacture a motive, so he took a short way with the
maintainers of a moral liberty. This doctrine, so gloomy, so grand, yet
so terrible, was, to Paul, a conviction, which he almost made practical;
nay, he seemed to realize a kind of poetic pleasure from reveries, which
represented to him the universe, with the sun and the stars, and all
living creatures--walking, flying, swimming, or crawling--going through
their parts in the great melodrama of destiny, no one knowing how, or
why, or wherefore, yet every human being believing that he is master of
his actions, at the very moment that he might be conscious that his
belief is only a part of the great law of necessity. Then it seemed as
if this delusion in which men indulge, and are forced to indulge, was an
element of the farce introduced into the play, so as to relieve the mind