taking leave of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences ? Does he know from experience the Minotauros of this den.⁠—I doubt it⁠—nay, I know otherwise. Nothing is more really alien to these “mono-fanatics,” these so-called “free spirits,” than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their belief in truth is unparalleled. I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters⁠—that dignified philosophic abstinence to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the factum brutum , that fatalism in “ petits faits ” (