With Pantheism likewise I was on my guard against its being lack of
courage, rather than a conviction of its untruth, which held me back
from embracing it. I thought it a true postulate that everything seemed
permeated and sustained by a Reason that had not human aims in front of
it and did not work by human means, a Divine Reason. Nature could only
be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself
to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in
possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval
creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements.
The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at
heart a worshipper of Nature.

But this same Nature was indifferent to the weal or woe of humans. It
obeyed its own laws regardless of whether men were lost thereby; it
seemed cruel in its callousness; it took care that the species should be
preserved, but the individual was nothing to it.

Now, like all other European children, I had been brought up in the
theory of personal immortality, a theory which, amongst other things, is
one way of expressing the immense importance, the eternal importance,
which is attributed to each individual. The stronger the feeling of his
own _ego_ that the individual has, the more eagerly he necessarily
clings to the belief that he cannot be annihilated. But to none could
the belief be more precious than to a youth who felt his life pulsate
within, as if he had twenty lives in himself and twenty more to live. It
was impossible to me to realise that I could die, and one evening, about
a year later, I astonished my master, Professor Broechner, by confessing
as much. "Indeed," said Broechner, "are you speaking seriously? You
cannot realise that you will have to die one day? How young! You are
very different from me, who always have death before my eyes."