Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/85

Rh eyebrows, and bending his head a little. He thought he had been trapped.

'This,' proceeded Daniel calmly, wishful to dispel his friend's annoyance, 'this was more or less my state of mind at the end of the first six months of my social "Lehrjahr," and there, owing to circumstances, my direct conscious and scientific pursuit of the subject (if I may so call it) suddenly ceased. The results of my "Wanderjahr," or rather "Wanderjahre," came pouring in upon me like a flood. It was not so much in the shape of the facts and experiences of my work, though these also played their part. It was rather as a sort of "Dichtung und Wahrheit" (since I am using Goethe's phraseology) of all my human dreams, my human hopes and aspirations during those ambiguous years. Socialism had become to me a practical creed, based on justice and to be erected with science. It now became to me a religion, with all the poetry of an incalculable future, which, as I take it, is the simple verifiable meaning of what the orthodox people call "heaven.

He paused a moment.

'I am not,' he said, 'going to expatiate on this now, for it does not concern our subject. I merely mention the fact of this irruption of a portion of my life, the use and significance of which I had before then utterly failed to perceive, and which I had,