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204 and divorcing of ideas. He deals in nuances; he may feign to believe, and to let himself be carried on by the regular and accepted currents. But the secret of his liberating power lies precisely in that delicate virtuosity which applies itself to the decomposition of thoughts that are apparently simple, to the separation of pairs which had been thought indissoluble, to the reëstablishment of harmonies and relationships between ideas which had been regarded as heterogeneous and distant, to the search for bits of truth amid the refuse of prejudice, to the gentle denuding of the most solemn truths, revealing, to startled eyes, the bare bones of contradiction. There is in his work a continual testing and experimenting; a knocking with the knuckles to find out what is empty and what is full; a search this way and that to discover the multiform paths of existence; a sounding of the stagnant wells of life and of the troubled seas of philosophy to find a sunken fragment, a lonely island. There is a turning and tossing on the pillow of doubt; a tenacious and joyous effort toward elemental reality (a reality ignoble, to be sure, but sincere); a polygonal assault upon the strongest fortresses of scientific and moral and metaphysical religion; a mania for examining, elucidating, purifying; and, finally, a delight, at times merely sterile, in giving utterly free play to an intelligence that finds rest and