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Rh which, even in this life, is fixed between men, without having "a sort of nightmare.… He saw the abyss ready to gape beneath the feet of fragile and unhappy human beings who think themselves bound together by a community of sympathy and suffering"—the sadness of this thought obsessed him.

To fill in this abyss of misunderstanding was his life-work. Herein lay the originality of his standpoint, that although he was the spokesman of the most advanced parties, he became the continual mediator between conflicting ideas. He sought to unite them all in the service of progress and of the common good. In philosophy he united idealism and realism—in history, the past and the present—in politics, the love of his own country and a respect for other countries. He refrained from denouncing that which has been, in the name of that which is to be, as many so-called free-thinkers have done; and far from condemning, he upheld the theories of all those who had been fighters in past centuries, to 184