And Lindner actually answered at almost the same instant: “I know quite well why you are asking me for this explanation. All your life you have probably heard people whispering in your ear that believing in a suprahuman reality, and obeying commandments that have their origin in this belief, belongs to the Middle Ages. You have learned that such fairy tales have been disposed of by science. But are you certain that this is really the case?”

Agathe noticed to her surprise that at every third word or so, his lips beneath the sparse beard stiffened and bulged like two assailants. She gave no answer. “Have you thought about it?” Lindner sternly continued. “Do you know the vast number of problems this involves? I see: You don’t know! And yet you dismiss this with a grandiose wave of your hand, and you probably don’t even know that you are merely acting under the control of extraneous forces!”

He had plunged into danger. It was not clear what whisperers he was thinking of. He felt himself carried away. His speech was a long tunnel drilled through a mountain in order to pounce on an idea, “lies of freethinking men,” that was displaying itself on the other side, shining in boastful self-glory. He meant neither Ulrich nor Hagauer, but he meant both of them, he meant all of them. “And even if you had thought about it,” he exclaimed in a boldly rising voice, “and were convinced of these falsehoods: that the body is nothing but a system of dead corpuscles, the soul an interplay of glands, society a ragbag of mechanical economic laws; and even if that were true, which is far from the case—I would still deny that such thinking knows the truth of life! Because that which calls itself science is not in the least qualified to elucidate by its superficial procedures what lives in a human being as an inner, spiritual certainty. The truth of life is a beginningless knowledge, and the facts of true life are not conveyed by proof: he who lives and suffers has them within himself as the mysterious power of higher claims and as the living exegesis of himself!”

Lindner stood up. His eyes flashed like two pulpit orators from the eminence provided by his long legs. Looking down at Agathe, he felt powerful. “Why does he talk so much right away?” she thought. “And what does he have against Ulrich? He hardly knows him, yet he’s obviously speaking against him!?”

Then her feminine experience in the arousal of feelings told her more quickly and certainly than reflection could have that Lindner was only speaking this way because he was ridiculously jealous. She looked up at him with an enchanting smile. The way he stood before her, tall, lissome, and armed, he appeared to her like a belligerent giant grasshopper from a past geological age. “Good heavens,” she thought, “now I’ll say something again that will make him mad and he’ll chase after me again. Where am I? What is this game I’m playing?” It confused her that Lindner made her laugh while particular phrases of his were not at all easy for her to forget—“beginningless knowledge,” for instance, or “living exegesis”—such alien words in these times, but secretly familiar to her, as if she had always used them herself, though she could not remember having so much as heard these expressions before. She thought: “It’s eerie, but he’s already planted some of his words into my heart like children!”