Ulrich had never experienced this contradiction more strongly than he did at the moment when the rising arc his reflections had traversed led him back to Agathe. Her innate readiness to resort to (and here again he used that cursory term) a good-bad form of expression, which had manifested itself so momentously in her tampering with their father’s will, offended the same readiness in his own nature, which had taken the merely speculative form of, one might say, a pastor’s admiration for the devil, while in his personal life he was not only capable of living fairly and squarely in accord with the times but, as he could see, did not wish to be disturbed in doing so. With equal degrees of melancholy satisfaction and ironic lucidity he noted that his entire theoretical preoccupation with evil amounted to wishing that he could protect evil incidents from the evil people who are itching to exploit them, and he suddenly felt a longing for goodness, as a man who has uselessly roamed about in foreign parts might imagine coming home someday and going straight to the village well to drink its water. But if this simile had not occurred to him first, he might have noticed that his entire effort to form an idea of Agathe as a morally hybrid person such as the present age produces in large numbers was only a pretext serving to shield him from a prospect that frightened him far more. For oddly enough, his sister’s behavior, which could not be condoned if one examined it consciously, exerted a beguiling allure as soon as one joined her in her dream; because then all discord and division vanished, and in their stead arose an impression of a passionate, affirmative, eagerly resolute goodness that, in comparison with its enfeebled everyday forms, could very easily be mistaken for an ancient vice.

Ulrich did not easily permit himself such an exaltation of his feelings, least of all when faced with the task of writing this letter, so he now directed his thoughts back out into generalities. These reflections would have been incomplete had he not remembered how easily and how often, in the times he had lived through, the longing for a duty drawn from the fullness of life had led to now one, now another virtue being selected from the available supply and made the focus of noisy veneration. National, Christian, humanistic virtues had all taken their turn; at one point it was steely strength, then it was kindness, individuality came next, soon thereafter community, one day it was the ethos of the split second, while the day before it was historical serenity: the shifting moods of public life basically derive from the exchange of such guiding ideals; but this had always left Ulrich indifferent and only made him feel that he was standing on the sidelines. Even now, all it meant to him was a complement to the general picture, for it is only a partial understanding that can lead one to believe it possible to tackle the moral uninterpretability of life, which sets in at a level of complexity that has become too great, with interpretations that are already part of the problem. Such attempts merely resemble the movements of a sick man restlessly changing his position while the paralysis that ties him to his bed advances inexorably. Ulrich was convinced that the condition that gave rise to these efforts was inevitable and that it defined the stage at which every civilization had begun to decline, because none so far had been able to generate a new inner excitement in place of the one it had lost. He was also convinced that what had happened to every moral system in the past lay in store for every future one. For the slackening of moral intensity has nothing to do with the domain of commandments and the following of them, it is independent of their distinctions, it is not amenable to external rigor, it is an entirely inner process, marked by a lessening of the meaning of all actions and of faith in the unity of responsibility for them.