The locus of this turnaround and those final steps could be described in the most general terms—and the paralyzing effect of this did not escape Ulrich—as follows: Every proposition in European morality leads to such a point beyond which there is nowhere further to go; so that a person giving account of himself has at first the gestures of a man wading in shallow waters, as long as he feels some firm conviction underfoot, until suddenly, when he goes a little farther, the gestures are those of a fearful drowning, as if the very foundations of life had fallen abruptly from the shallows to a depth that offers no foothold at all. This manifested itself outwardly in the siblings’ conversation as well: Ulrich could talk in a calm and elucidating manner on any subject he started out with so long as his intellect was engaged, and Agathe felt a similar eagerness in listening; but then, when they stopped and were silent, a much more intense alertness came into their faces. And so it happened once that they were led across the boundary at which they had unconsciously halted before then. Ulrich had maintained that “the only distinguishing mark of our morality is that its commandments contradict each other. The most moral of all propositions is this one: The exception proves the rule!” Probably all that provoked him to say this was his aversion to a moral system that pretends to be unbending but in practice has to bend at every turn, which means it is the opposite of an exact procedure that takes account of experience first and obtains the law from those observations. Of course he was aware of the distinction that is made between natural and moral laws, according to which the first are derived from the observation of nature, which knows no morality, while the second must be imposed on the less obstinate nature of man; but in his opinion something about this division was no longer valid, and he had been about to say that moral thought was a hundred years behind the times, and that this was why morals were so difficult to apply to present-day needs. But before he reached that point in his explanation, Agathe interrupted him with an answer that seemed very simple but at that moment took Ulrich by surprise.

“Is being good not good, then?” she asked her brother, and there was something in her eyes that he had seen before, when she was doing something with the medals that would probably not have been good in everyone’s estimation.

“You’re right,” he replied eagerly. “One really does have to start with such a proposition if one wants to feel the original meaning again! But children still love being good the way they love sweets—”

“Being bad too,” Agathe added.

“But is being good one of the passions of adults?” Ulrich asked. “It’s one of their principles! Not that they are good, that would strike them as childish. They do good. A good man is a person with good principles who does good works: it’s an open secret that he may at the same time be thoroughly loathsome!”