Nevertheless, he did not want to say anything more about it, and he let the apparently ingenious venture rest without having got beyond the introduction.—He had the feeling of having touched upon something very large in an awkward and circuitous manner. The large subject was the profoundly ambiguous nature of the world, the fact that it seems to move forwards as well as backwards and is appalling as well as inspiring; and that it cannot affect a cultivated person otherwise, if only because history is precisely not the history of important figures but quite evidently that of the average man, whose confused and equivocal features have imprinted themselves on the world. That conclusion, on the other hand, so swiftly arrived at, had been encumbered with needless complexity in the attempt to give the well-known nature of the average man, by a comparison with the nature of probability, a background whose novelty had not yet been fully explored. But even in this comparison, the basic idea was no doubt seemingly simple. For the average is always also something probable, and the average man is the sediment of all probability. But when Ulrich compared what he had said with what could still be said about it, he almost gave up hope of continuing what he had begun with his juxtaposition of probability and history.

Agathe said with mischievous hesitation: “The concierge dreams of the lottery and hopes she will win! So presuming I had the honor of understanding you, the purpose of history would be to leave behind an ever more undistinguished breed of human being and justify its existence, for which I suppose there is no lack of evidence, or at least no lack of hints that this may be the case; and to accomplish this task, the simplest and soundest thing history could do would be to just leave everything to chance and let the laws of probability determine the distribution and combination of events?” Ulrich nodded. “It’s an if-then. If human history actually had a purpose, and if this were its purpose, then history could not be better than it is, and would in this strange way attain a purpose of not having a purpose!”

Agathe laughed. “And that’s why you’re telling me that the low ceiling under which one lives has a ‘not unuseful’ purpose?”

“A profoundly necessary purpose, the promotion of the average!” Ulrich confirmed. “It is for this purpose that feeling and will are once and for all prevented from growing to the sky.”

“Would that the opposite happened!” Agathe said. “Then my ear wouldn’t be getting sore from paying such close attention before I know everything!”

It seemed to Agathe that a conversation like this about genius, the average man, and probability, which engaged the mind but left the feelings untouched, was a waste of time. Ulrich did not feel quite the same way, even though he was heartily dissatisfied with what he had said. Nothing about it was solid except for the proposition: If something were a game of chance, the result would evince the same distribution of hits and misses as life does. But the fact that the second part of such a conditional proposition is true does not permit the conclusion that the first part is true as well!