“How few people,” he said to himself, “have a truly empathic soul!” He imagined a soul that is able to put itself completely in the place of a fellow human being, suffer his most hidden sorrows with him, and descend into his profound weakness. “What a prospect!” he cried out to himself. “What a miraculous proximity of divine mercy, what consolation, what a feast day for the soul!” But then he recalled how few people were even able to listen attentively to their neighbors; for he was one of those well-meaning ramblers who free-associate from the solemn to the trite without noticing the difference. “How rarely, for instance, is the question ‘How are you?’ meant seriously,” he thought. “One needs only to answer in detail how one feels in one’s heart, and soon enough one finds oneself looking into a bored and distracted face.”

Well, he had not been guilty of this error! According to his principles, protecting the weak was the particular and indispensable hygienics of the strong, who without such benevolent self-limitation would all too easily lapse into brutality; and culture, too, needed works of mercy to protect against the dangers inherent within itself. “Anyone wishing to enlighten us about ‘universal education,’” he confirmed for himself through inner acclamation, deliciously refreshed by a sudden lightning bolt hurled at his fellow pedagogue Hagauer, “should truly first be advised: Experience how another person feels! Knowing through empathy means a thousand times more than knowing through books!” It was evidently an old difference of opinion he was now venting on the liberal concept of education on the one hand, and on the wife of his colleague on the other, for Lindner’s glasses were peering about like two shields of a doubly puissant warrior. He had been inhibited in Agathe’s presence, but if she had seen him now he would have appeared to her like a commander, and in charge of troops that were anything but frivolous. For a truly manly soul is prepared to help, and it is prepared to help because it is manly. He raised the question of whether he had acted correctly when faced with that beautiful woman, and answered himself: “It would be wrong if the high challenge of subordination to the law were left to those who are too weak for it; and it would be a disheartening spectacle if only mindless pedants were permitted to be the protectors and shapers of moral norms; that is why the vital and strong have the obligation, out of their very instinct for health and strength, to call for discipline and limits; they must support the weak, shake the thoughtless, rein in the unbridled.” He had the impression that he had done so.