Now if Haber were to die
to-day, a flourishing tract of land and a hundred people whose
existence he has improved would testify aloud that his term on earth
had not been in vain.
"And for all that, Eynhardt was a rare and noble character, and
Haber the personification of all that is commonplace and work-a-day.
Eynhardt's gaze was on the stars, Haber's eyes fixed on the ground
at his feet. Wilhelm plucked that supremest fruit of the Tree of
Knowledge, the consciousness of our ignorance; Paul has the conceit
to think himself a discoverer, to have solved enigmas. But the
noble, soaring spirit leaves no trace behind, and the dull, mediocre
person plows his name in deep and enduring characters in the soil of
his native land. What was wanting in Eynhardt to make him not only a
harmonious but a useful being? Obviously only the will. But was this
want an organic one? I do not think so, for his lofty moral beauty
was perfect in proportion and balance, and this noble nature could
not possibly have been born incomplete, impossible that in a being
so perfectly formed in all other respects such an important organ as
the will should be missing. His absence of volition was but the
result of his perception of the vanity of all earthly ambitions, and
his absence of desire the outcome of his contempt for all that was
worthless and transitory, his aversion to the ways of the world a
tragic foregoing of the hope of ever getting behind it, and reaching
the eternal root and significance of the thing itself.
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