When he wishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths some extraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha.

When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest scheme of morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does not put it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders of mankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name of Ben Ezra.

It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of his that when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and the disinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not select any of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whose investigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world.
He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satire and pity, the _a priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

His supreme type of the human intellect is neither the academic nor the positivist, but the alchemist.

It is difficult to imagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to the ordinary modern point of view.