Louise Maude

then I only dimly sus­pec­ted this, and like all lun­at­ics, simply called all men lun­at­ics ex­cept my­self.

In some of its de­vel­op­ments pro­gress has pro­ceeded wrongly, and with prim­it­ive peas­ant chil­dren one must deal in a spirit of per­fect free­dom, let­ting them choose what path of pro­gress they please.”

Then these mo­ments of per­plex­ity began to re­cur of­tener and of­tener, and al­ways in the same form. They were al­ways ex­pressed by the ques­tions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

As long as I did not know why, I could do noth­ing and could not live.

Today or to­mor­row sick­ness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; noth­ing will re­main but stench and worms.

All hu­man­ity lives and de­vel­ops on the basis of spir­itual prin­ciples and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are ex­pressed in re­li­gions, in sci­ences, in arts, in forms of gov­ern­ment. Those ideals be­come more and more el­ev­ated, and hu­man­ity ad­vances to its highest wel­fare. I am part of hu­man­ity, and there­fore my vo­ca­tion is to for­ward the re­cog­ni­tion and the real­iz­a­tion of the ideals of hu­man­ity.

He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the lim­it­less dis­tance, but sees that his home is not and can­not be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the dark­ness, but there also his home is not.

Judging by cer­tain memor­ies, I never ser­i­ously be­lieved them, but had merely re­lied on what I was taught and on what was pro­fessed by the grown-up people around me, and that re­li­ance was very un­stable.

though it is ne­ces­sary to learn the cat­ech­ism and go to church, one must not take such things too ser­i­ously. I

most cases, I think, it hap­pens thus: a man lives like every­body else, on the basis of prin­ciples not merely hav­ing noth­ing in com­mon with re­li­gious doc­trine, but gen­er­ally op­posed to it; re­li­gious doc­trine does not play a part in life, in in­ter­course with oth­ers it is never en­countered, and in a man’s own life he never has to reckon with it. Re­li­gious doc­trine is pro­fessed far away from life and in­de­pend­ently of it. If it is en­countered, it is only as an ex­ternal phe­nomenon dis­con­nec­ted from life.