He gave himself over to these impressions, which just a short while ago he had called “the futile actuality of life,” with such eagerness that little by little, as he took his fill of the world, he began to feel sated, until his earlier antagonism returned. Now Ulrich knew exactly where the weakness of his speculations lay. “What would be the point,” he asked himself, “in the face of this self-sufficient glory, of looking for some outcome above, behind, or beneath it all?! What would that be: a philosophy? An all-encompassing conviction, a law? Or God’s finger? Or rather the assumption that morality has until now lacked an ‘inductive ethos,’ that it is much harder to be good than has generally been supposed, and that it will require an endless collaborative effort similar to the kind practiced everywhere in scientific research? I assume there is no morality because it cannot be deduced from anything constant, that there are only rules for the useless maintenance of transient conditions; and I assume there is no deep happiness without a deep morality: but even so it strikes me as a pallid, unnatural state of affairs that I’m pondering over this, and it isn’t at all what I want!” Indeed, he might well have asked himself far more simply: “What have I taken upon myself?” And now he did that. But this question touched his sensibility more than his intellect; indeed it interrupted his thinking, and even before he apprehended it as a question, it had already eroded, bit by bit, Ulrich’s always alert delight in strategic planning. It had begun like a dark tone close to his ear, accompanying him; then the tone was inside himself, just an octave deeper than everything else; and now Ulrich was finally at one with the question and seemed to himself like a strangely deep sound in the bright hard world, surrounded by a wide interval. So what had he actually taken upon himself, what had he promised?