This brilliant and versatile young man was studying chemistry and turned a deaf ear to all questions that had no clear-cut answer. He was, indeed, an embittered opponent of all such considerations and was a fanatical disciple of the cool, soberly fantastical, world-encompassing spirit of modern technology. He was in favour of doing away with the emotions. He was the antagonist of poetry, kindness, virtue, simplicity. Song-birds need a branch to perch on, and the branch a tree, and the tree the dumb brown earth to grow in; but he flew, he was between the ages, he was somewhere in mid-air. After this age, one that destroys just as much as it constructs, there will come one that will inherit the new premises we are so ascetically creating, and only then will it be possible to say what we ought to have felt about things. Such was more or less his train of thought. For the time being the thing was to be as tough and austere as on an expedition.