ured himself, pale and thin, without food, without books;
and although he had the harmless vanity to believe that privation and
penury would affect him less deeply than the poor devils he visited,
the idea that he saw his own face before him, as it might have been had
he not had the good luck to be his father's heir opened his hand still
wider, and added to the money words of sympathy and comfort, which
afforded the recipients--unless they were utterly hardened--as much
pleasure as the donation itself.

Beside his almsgiving, he now had another occupation which took up all
his surplus time. Schrotter had not let the suggestion drop which he
made at Dorfling's dinner-party, and had persuaded Wilhelm so long that
he finally rouse himself to attempt an account of the ways and means by
which the human mind has freed itself of its grossest errors. It was to
be entitled "A History of Human Ignorance," and promised to be a most
original work. He would endeavor to show what idea people had had of
the universe at various periods, how they explained the phenomena of
nature, their connection, their causes and effects. He would begin with
the childish superstitions of the savages, and continuing through the
so-called learned systems of the ancients and of the Middle Ages, would
bring his history up to the theories of contemporary scientists. He
would demonstrate the psychological causes of the fact that man, at a
certain stage of intellectual development, must necessarily fall into
certain errors, and by the aid of what experiments, experiences, and
conclusions he had come gradually to recognize them as such. How the
fresh interpretation of a single phenomenon would overturn, at one
blow, a number of other phenomena hitherto considered entirely
satisfactory, how prevailing scientific theories, instead of assisting
the fearless observer or discoverer, invariably hindered him and turned
him from the right path, in proof of which assertion he brought forward
such striking examples as Aristotle's convulsive endeavors to make each
of the senses correspond to one of the four elements in which they
believed in his day, and Kepler with his fantastic efforts to prove the
supremacy of the Pythagorean seven in the solar system. The object of
the book was to show that the history of human knowledge is a history
of false inferences and the erroneous interpretations of correctly
observed phenomena, that the increase of knowledge always means the