With my anxiety increasing every moment, I feel not only that I could have loved Aniela, but that I do love her beyond expression, and also that I might become an incomparably better man.  Strictly speaking, why do I act as if beyond nerves and egoism there were nothing else in me? and if there be anything else, why does not my auto-analysis point it out to me?  I have the courage to draw extreme conclusions, and do not hide the truth from myself, but I decidedly negative the notion.  Why?  Because I have the unshaken conviction that I am better than my actions.  The cause of the latter is partly a certain incapacity of life, partly the inheritance of my race and the disease of the times in which I live, and finally that over-analysis which does not permit me to follow the first, simple impulses of nature, but criticises until it reduces the soul to utter impotence.  When a child I used to amuse myself by piling up coin upon coin until the column, bending under its own weight, tumbled down into one chaotic heap.  I am doing now exactly the same with my thoughts and intentions, until they collapse and roll over each other in a disorderly confusion.  For this very reason it has always been easier for me to play a passive part than an active one.  It appears to me that many cultured people are attacked by the same disease.  Criticism of ourselves and everything else is corroding our active power; we have no stable basis, no point of issue, no faith in life.  Therein lies the reason why I do not care so much to win Aniela as I am afraid of losing her.  In speaking of a disease common to our time, I will not confine myself exclusively to my own case.  That somebody takes to his bed when an epidemic disease is raging is a very common occurrence; nowadays criticism of everything is the epidemic spreading all over the world.  The result is that various roofs that sheltered men collapse over their heads.  Religion, the very name of which means “ties,” is getting unloosened.  Faith, even in those who still believe, is getting restive.  Through the roof of what we call Fatherland social currents begin to filter.  There remains only one ideal in presence of which the most hardened sceptic raises his hat,—­the People.  But on the base of this statue mischievous spirits are beginning already to scribble more or less ribald jokes, and, what is still more strange, the mist of unbelief is rising from the heads of those who, in the nature of things, ought to bow down reverently.  Finally there will come a gifted sceptic, a second Heine, to spit and trample on the idol, as in his time did Aristophanes; he will not, however, trample on it in the name of old ideals, but in the name of freedom of thought, in the name of freedom of doubt; and what will happen then I do not know.  Most likely on the huge, clean-wiped slate the devil will write sonnets.  Can anything be done to prevent all this?  Finally, what does it matter to me?  To attempt anything is not my business; I have been trained too carefully