In order for the converse of this proposition to be believable, a more rigorous comparison would be needed, namely one that would first make it possible to project notions of probability onto historical and spiritual events and thus compare two such different mental horizons. This was something Ulrich no longer felt like doing; but the more conscious he was of that neglect, the more convinced he became that the problem he had touched upon was an important one. Not only has the growing influence of masses of people with lackadaisical habits of mind—which is leveling humanity more and more toward the midrange—given added significance to any question concerning the structure and development of the human average; but also the basic question of what is the nature of probability seems to tend more and more, for different reasons, including ones that are universal and of intellectual provenance, to assume the place occupied by the question of the nature of truth, even though originally it was merely a practical tool for solving particular problems.

All of this could have been expressed by saying that little by little the “probable human being” and the “probable life” were beginning to supplant the “true” human being and “true” life, which were nothing more than a vain illusion and pretense; rather like something Ulrich had suggested previously, when he said that the whole problem was nothing more than the result of a haphazard evolution. He himself evidently still felt somewhat in the dark trying to fathom the meaning of all such observations, yet precisely this weakness gave them the capacity to illuminate wide regions, like a Saint Elmo’s fire, and he knew so many examples of contemporary life and thought to which they applied that he found himself vividly challenged to transform the felt sense he had of them into something more lucid. So there was no lack of a need for a continuation, and he now decided after all that he would not neglect to take it up on a more fitting occasion. He had to smile at his surprise when he realized that with this resolve he was well on his way, without wanting it, to introducing Agathe to something that long ago, in a skeptical mood, he had called “the world of ‘the like of it happens.’” It was the world of unrest without meaning; he now called it the world of “probable humanity.” With revived curiosity he observed the streams of people whom they had been following, by whose passions, habits, and alien pleasures they were being drawn away from themselves: it was the world of those passions and pleasures, and not that of a possibility not yet dreamed to its conclusion! And because it was that, it was also the world of limits, which set boundaries to even the most dissolute emotions, and it was the world of the middling condition of life. For the first time he was thinking, not just through his feelings but in the way in which something real is expected, that the difference that makes it impossible for emotion to come to rest and lasting fulfillment, in one case, or to find an evolving and worldly movement, in another, can perhaps be ascribed to two fundamentally different states or kinds of feeling.