“Between my fourteenth and sixteenth years I passed through an unpleasant phase of development, becoming an intolerable nuisance to everybody, especially to my father, through a passion for discussion. On everyone who met me in the street I wanted to inflict thorough-going and closely reasoned considerations on any questions that were then being generally discussed in order to expose the errors of the conventional views and get the correct view recognised and appreciated. The joy of seeking for what was true and serviceable had come upon me like a kind of intoxication, and every conversation in which I took part had to go back to fundamentals. Thus I emerged from the shell of reserve in which I had hitherto concealed myself, and became the disturber of every conversation which was meant to be merely conversation. What a number of times at both Mülhausen and Gunsbach, did I bring the conversation at meals into stormy water! My aunt scolded me as being insolent, because I wanted to argue out my ideas with grown­up people as though they were of my own age. If we went to pay a visit anywhere, I had to promise my father not to spoil the day for him by ‘stupid behaviour during conversations’.

“I must confess to having been as intolerable as a well-brought up young man, half-way through his education, ever can be, but it was not in the least any egotistic disputatiousness which made me so; it was a passionate need of thinking, and of seeking with the help of others for the truth and the serviceable. The light and truth-seeking spirit of my grand-father Schillinger had awoke in me. The conviction that human progress is possible only if reasoned thought replaces mere opinion and absence of thought had seized hold of me, and its first manifestations made themselves felt in this stormy and disagreeable fashion.

“However, this unpleasant fermentation worked itself off and left the wine clear, though I have remained essentially what I then became. I have always felt clearly that if I were to surrender my enthusiasm for the true and the serviceable, as recognized by means of thought, I should be surrendering my very self. I am, therefore, essentially as intolerable as ever, only I try as well as I can to reconcile that disposition with the claims of con­ventional manners, so as not to annoy other people. Bowing to these claims, I force myself to take part m conversations which are merely conversations, and to listen to empty, unthinking chatter without rebelling against them. My innate reserve has in this matter helped me to adopt as my own this usual behaviour of the well-bred.

“But how often do I inwardly rebel! How much I suffer from the way we spend so much of our time uselessly instead of talking in serious fashion about serious things, and getting to know each other well as hoping and believing, striving and suffering mortals! I often feel it to be absolutely wrong to sit like that with a mask on, so to say. Many a time I ask myself how far we can carry this good breeding without harm to our integrity.

“If I meet people to whom it is possible to open oneself out as a man who thinks, I feel a passionate enjoyment in their society as if I were as young as ever, and if I stumble on a young man who is ready for serious discussion, I give myself up to a joyous exchange of cut and thrust which makes the difference between our ages, whether for good or ill, a thing of no account.”

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