This way in which the honorable side of life and its indignity adhere to each other has been judged in very different ways. Pious misanthropists have seen in it a consequence of earthly frailty; men of brawn, life’s juiciest filet; denizens of the middle range feel as comfortable in this contradiction as they do between their right and left hands; and the circumspect simply say that the world was not created to correspond to human ideas. So it has been regarded as the imperfection of the world or of human expectations, has been accepted with childlike trust on one hand and melancholy resignation or defiant indifference on the other, and all in all, settling this question may be a matter of temperament rather than a soberly honorable task for reason. However, as certainly as the world was not created to correspond to human expectations, it is equally certain that human ideas were created to correspond to the world, for that is their purpose; and why it is precisely in the sphere of the right and the beautiful that this never comes to pass is a strangely open question. The siblings’ aimless walks illustrated this like a picture book and gave rise to conversations that were accompanied by the loosely varying excitement of turning its pages.

None of these conversations treated its subject in a concrete and thoroughgoing way, each of them over their course turned upon the most various related themes; as a result, their overall context became more and more broad; their structure, determined by a succession of living occasions, broke down again and again, its borders flooded by an influx of new animated observations; and this continued for a long time, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing, before the result was unmistakably evident. The first hypothesis Ulrich adopted—whether by chance or not, with conviction or haphazardly—was that the limit imposed on feeling and also the advances and retreats, or at least the to and fro, of life—its intellectual unreliability, in short—perhaps fulfilled a not unuseful purpose, namely that of producing and sustaining a middling condition of life.

He did not want to demand of the world that it be a pleasure garden for genius. Only at its peaks, if not its excesses, is history the story of genius and its works; in the main it is the story of the average man. He is the material that the world works with and that continually emerges anew from it. Perhaps it was only a moment of fatigue that inspired this thought. Perhaps Ulrich was just building on the notion that it is the middling and average that is sturdiest and offers the best prospects for preserving the species; one had to assume that the first law of life is self-preservation, and that may very well be the case. But undoubtedly, a different outlook was adding its voice to this beginning. We may take it for granted that it is not the average man who creates the great upswings of human history; nonetheless, taking everything into account, genius and stupidity, heroism and indecision, history is precisely a history of millions of impulses and resistances, qualities, decisions, adjustments, passions, insights, and errors, which the average man receives from all sides and distributes in all directions. The same elements are mixed together both in him and in history; and this is the respect in which history is at all events a history of averages or, depending on how you might view it, the average of millions of stories, and if history as a result hovers forever around the undistinguished middle range, what could be more nonsensical than to take umbrage at the mediocrity of an average!