The last redoubt still holding out in his defense was guarded by a strong aversion to the fact that notions like “self,” “feeling,” “goodness,” “the other goodness,” “evil,” of which he had made a great deal of use, were so personal and at the same time so high-flown and rarified that they really befitted the moral speculations of much younger people. He fared as doubtless many who follow his story will fare: he irritably picked out individual phrases, asking himself such questions as: “ ‘Production and results of feelings’? What a mechanical, rationalistic idea, what ignorance of human nature! ‘Morality as the problem of a permanent state to which all individual states are subordinate,’ and that’s it? How perfectly inhuman!” If one looked at this through the eyes of a reasonable person, it all seemed tremendously perverse. “The very essence of morality has as its foundation that the important feelings always remain the same,” Ulrich thought, “and the only thing required of the individual is that he act in harmony with them!” But just at that moment the lines, drawn with T square and compass, that defined the rolling locality that enclosed him came to a halt at a spot where his eye, peering out from the body of a modern means of transport and still involuntarily participating in its equipment and furnishings, lit on a stone pillar that had been standing at the edge of the street since the baroque period, so that the unconsciously registered technical comfort of a rational creation suddenly stood in contrast to the eruptive passion of that ancient gesture, which suggested something not unlike a petrified stomachache. The effect of this optical collision was an uncommonly intense confirmation of the ideas from which Ulrich had just been trying to escape. Could anything have made the aimlessness of life more obvious than that accidental glance? Without taking sides with either the Now or the Then in matters of taste, as one usually does when such juxtapositions occur, his mind did not hesitate for a moment in feeling left out by both modernity and tradition, and saw only the grand demonstration of a problem that is likely at bottom a moral one. He could not doubt that the transitoriness of what is regarded as style, culture, the will of the times or the spirit of the age, and is admired as such, is a moral defect. For on the vast scale of the ages this means the same as if, on the smaller scale of one’s own life, one were to develop one’s faculties in a completely one-sided way, squandering oneself in excess and dissolution, never attaining a measure of one’s will, never quite forming a full-fledged character, swept along by one haphazard passion after the other. For that reason it seemed to him also that what is called the “changes” or even the “progress” of historical periods is just a term for the fact that none of these experiments ever arrives at a point where all of them would unite on the way to a conviction that would embrace the totality and thereby provide, for the first time, a possible basis for steady development, lasting enjoyment, and that gravity of great beauty of which nowadays scarcely more than a shadow occasionally falls into our life.