the buildings which composed a part of his dilapidated manor, and
which claimed the imposing name of the fortress of Geierfels, and
at once installed himself therein, hoping to pass the rest of his
life in peaceable and studious seclusion.

Count Kostia was gifted with a quick and ready intellect, which he
had strengthened by study. He had always been passionately fond of
historical research, but above everything, knew and wished to know,
only that which the English call "the matter of fact." He
professed a cold scorn for generalities, and heartily abandoned
them to "dreamers;" he laughed at all abstract theories and at the
ingenuous minds which take them seriously. He held that all system
was but logical infatuation; that the only pardonable follies were
those which were frankly avowed; and that only a pedant could
clothe his imagination in geometrical theories. In general,
pedantry to his eyes was the least excusable of vices; he
understood it to be the pretension of tracing back phenomena to
first causes, "as if," said he, "there were any 'first causes,' or
chance admitted of calculation!" This did not prevent him however
from expending much logic to demonstrate that there was no such
thing as logic, either in nature or in man.

These are inconsistencies for which skeptics never dream of
reproaching themselves; they pass their lives in reasoning against
reason. In short, Count Kostia respected nothing but facts, and
believed that, properly viewed, there was nothing else, and that
the universe, considered as an entirety, was but a collection of
contradictory accidents.

A member of the Historical and Antiquarian Society of Moscow, he