A Case of Discovery

and adolescence. There must be something morbid and radically wrong in a system and a creed that goes against our Human Nature. When I was passing through this phase of my spiritual life, I had to go, in the first place, to Paris and then a year later on to St. Petersburg. In Paris I soon became quite familiar with the French language which I had already begun to study in Leipzig. French opened altogether, a new world to me. It gave me, so to say, a new soul. I began to study and take delight in the works of Moliere and Racine, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, Renan and Taine. And quite particularly Voltaire, who appeared and still appears to me the greatest literary genius that the world has ever produced. But the works of Voltaire, though they immensely tickled and amused me, served only to make me a more confirmed sceptic than ever. The forty volumes of his Oeuvres completes which range over almost all subjects of human thought and feeling had, however, the effect of laughing me, for good, out of my German gaucherie and Buddhistic pessimism. The influence of Renan, though sceptical, was far more ethical and artistic. His “La Vie de Jesus” (Life of Jesus) is one of the best books I have ever read, deeply impressing me with its poetical style and moral earnestness. Renan led me to take an interest in Semitic religions and in Semitic languages. The works of Max Muller, with which I had been very familiar for several years, had already taught me how to study languages and religions from a scientific standpoint. Renan only continued what Max Muller had already begun, and I threw myself, heart and soul, into the comparative study of all the great religions of the world, to wit: Judaism, Zoroastrianism and Brahaminism