"Ah!" replied Maimon, "there are beautiful dreams and hopes—"
"Which will surely be fulfilled. Should you not wish to come again into the society of Mendelssohn?"
Maimon was silent.
Suddenly the dying man cried out, "Ay me! I have been a fool, the most foolish among the most foolish." The thought of Nathan the Wise was indeed as a fiery scourge. Too late he realized that the passion for Truth had destroyed him. Knowledge alone was not sufficient for life. The will and the emotions demanded their nutriment and exercise as well as the intellect. Man was not made merely to hunt an abstract formula, pale ghost of living realities.
"To seek for Truth"—yes, it was one ideal. But there remained also—as the quotation went on which Mendelssohn's disciples had chosen as their motto—"To love the beautiful, to desire the good, to do the best." Mendelssohn with his ordered scheme of harmonious living, with his equal grasp of thought and life, sanely balanced betwixt philosophy and letters, learning and business, according so much to Hellenism, yet not losing hold of Hebraism, and adjusting with equal mind the claims of the Ghetto and the claims of Culture, Mendelssohn shone before Maimon's dying eyes, as indeed the Wise.
The thinker had a last gleam of satisfaction in seeing so lucidly the springs of his failure as a human being. Happiness was the child of fixedness—in opinions, in space. Soul and body had need of a centre, a pivot, a home.
He had followed the hem of Truth to the mocking horizon: he had in turn fanatically adopted every philosophical system Peripatetic, Spinozist, Leibnozist, Leibnitzian, Kantian—and what did he know now he was going beyond the horizon? Nothing. He had won a place among the thinkers of Germany. But if he could only have had his cast-off son to close his dying eyes, and could only have believed in the prayers his David would have sobbed out, how willingly would he have consented to be blotted out from the book of fame. A Passover tune hummed in his brain, sad, sweet tears sprang to his eyes—yea, his soul found more satisfaction in a meaningless melody charged with tremulous memories of childhood, than in all the philosophies.
A melancholy synagogue refrain quavered on his lips, his soul turned yearningly towards these ascetics and mystics, whose life was a voluntary martyrdom to a misunderstood righteousness, a passionate sacrifice to a naïve conception of the cosmos. The infinite pathos of their lives touched him to forgetfulness of his own futility. His soul went out to them, but his brain denied him the comfort of their illusions.
He set his teeth and waited for death.
The Pastor spoke again: "Yes, you have been foolish. But that you say so now shows your soul is not beyond redemption. Christ is ever on the threshold."