For more than this, be it for good or for evil, the real Gipsy has, unlike all other men, unlike the lowest savage, positively no religion, no tie to a spiritual world, no fear of a future, nothing but a few trifling superstitions and legends, which in themselves indicate no faith whatever in anything deeply seated.

It would be difficult, I think, for any highly civilised man, who had not studied Thought deeply, and in a liberal spirit, to approach in the least to a rational comprehension of a real Gipsy mind.

During my life it has been my fortune to become intimate with men who were "absolutely" or "positively" free-thinkers--men who had, by long study and mere logic, completely freed themselves from any mental tie whatever.

Such men are rare; it requires an enormous amount of intellectual culture, an unlimited expenditure of pains in the metaphysical hot-bed, and tremendous self- confidence to produce them--I mean "the real article." Among the most thorough of these, a man on whom utter and entire freedom of thought sat easily and unconsciously, was a certain German doctor of philosophy named P---.

To him God and all things were simply ideas of development.