“Oh, that’s impossible to say. He’s good!” his sister replied, laughing.

“You can no more rely on what appears good to you than on what appears good to Count Leinsdorf,” Ulrich retorted testily.

Both their faces were tensed with excitement and laughter: the flow of polite and lighthearted humor was restrained by deeper counter­currents.

“For centuries,” Ulrich continued, “the world has known truth in the realm of thought and accordingly, to a certain degree and on a rational plane, freedom of thought. But during the same time, feeling has not known the stern school of truth, nor has it been schooled in freedom of movement. For every morality in its time has regulated feeling only insofar—and rigidly at that, even within this perimeter—as certain basic tenets and basic emotions were needed for whatever action that morality favored; the rest was left to discretion, to the private play of emotions, to the ambiguous efforts of art, and to academic discussion. So morality has adapted feelings to the needs of morality and in doing so neglected to develop them, even though it is itself dependent on feelings: morality is, after all, the order and integrity of the emotional life.”

Here he paused, feeling Rachel’s fascinated stare on his zealously animated face.

“I suppose it’s funny that I talk about morality even here in the kitchen,” he said, embarrassed.

Agathe was looking at him intently and thoughtfully. He leaned in closer to his sister and added softly, with a quick, jocular smile: “But it’s only another manifestation of a state of passion that takes up arms against the whole world!”

Without intending to, he was reenacting their confrontation of the morning, in which he had performed the unappealing part of the would-be preceptor. He could not help it. For him morality was neither social authority nor philosophic wisdom, but living the infinite wholeness of what is possible. He believed in morality’s capacity for intensification, in stages of moral experience, and not merely in the usual notion of stages of moral understanding, as if morality were something already complete for which man was just not pure enough. He believed in morality without believing in any specific morality. Morality is generally understood to be a set of police regulations for keeping life in order; and since life does not obey even these, they come to seem not quite possible to live up to and in this paltry way gain the status of an ideal. But morality must not be brought to this level. Morality is imagination. That was what he wanted Agathe to see. And his second point was: Imagination is not arbitrary. Once the imagination is given over to whim, there is a price to pay. The words twitched in Ulrich’s mouth. He was on the verge of talking about the neglected difference between the way various historical epochs developed the rational mind in their own fashion, and the way, also in their own fashion, they fixed and closed off the moral imagination. He was on the verge of saying this because the consequence, however much one may doubt it, has been a more or less steadily rising line, through all the mutations of history, of rational thought and its creations, as against a heap of feelings, ideas, and vital possibilities that are piled up in stratified layers like shards of eternal side issues just the way they were left when they came into being and were then abandoned. Because a further consequence is that there are countless possibilities of having an opinion one way or another as soon as one enters the realm of fundamentals, without there ever being any possibility of bringing these possibilities together. Because one consequence is that these opinions come to blows, as there is no possibility of their coming to an understanding. Because consequently, all told, the affective life of mankind slops back and forth like water in a tub that lacks a firm foundation. And Ulrich had an idea that had been haunting him all evening, an old idea of his, incidentally, but everything that had happened this evening had simply continuously confirmed it, and he wanted to show Agathe where the fault lay and how it could be remedied if everyone wanted it, and in truth, all that he had wanted to express with that thought was the painful intention to prove that one could not any more read­ily trust the discoveries of one’s own imagination either.