And so, without his having previously intended it, Ulrich’s thoughts returned to the idea he had once jokingly characterized, in a remark to Count Leinsdorf, as the “general secretariat for precision and soul”; and even though on other occasions he had only brought it up playfully and in jest, he now realized that all his adult life he had consistently behaved as if such a “general secretariat” lay within the realm of possibility. Perhaps—he could tell himself this by way of excuse—every thinking person carries such an idea of order within himself, just as grown men still wear beneath their clothes the pictures of saints which their mothers hung around their necks when they were children, and this icon of order which no one dares to either take seriously or discard must look more or less like this: on one side it vaguely symbolizes the longing for a law of right living, an iron and natural law that allows no exception and is proof to every objection, that is as freeing as a rapture and as sober as the truth; the other side, however, represents the conviction that one’s own eyes will never behold such a law, that one’s own thoughts will never conceive it, that no single man’s gospel and authority but only an exertion by all will bring it about, if it is not altogether a chimera. For a moment Ulrich hesitated. Undoubtedly he was a believer who just didn’t believe anything: his greatest dedication to science had never succeeded in making him forget that the beauty and goodness of people comes from what they believe and not from what they know. But faith had always been bound up with knowledge, even if only an imagined knowledge, ever since the primordial days of its magical origin. And this ancient component of knowledge has long since rotted and has pulled faith down with it into the same decay: the task now, therefore, is to establish that connection anew. And, of course, not simply in a manner that raises faith “to the level of knowledge”; but rather in such a way that it takes wing from that height. The art of rising above knowledge must be practiced again. And since this cannot be done by any one person, all human beings would have to turn their minds to it, whatever else their minds might be occupied with; and when Ulrich at this moment thought of a ten-year, a hundred-year, or a thousand-year plan humanity would have to adopt in order to direct its efforts toward that goal, he did not have to inquire very far to realize that this was what he had long imagined, under all sorts of names, as the truly experimental life. For what he meant by the word “faith” was not that stunted wanting-to-know, that credulous ignorance that generally goes by the name of faith, but rather an intuitive knowing that is neither knowledge, nor imagination, nor belief either, but precisely that “other” quality that eludes all these terms.