At Alzugaray’s house, Cæsar felt at home. Ignacio’s mother, a lady with white hair, was always making stockings, and after dinner she recited the rosary with the maid; Alzugaray’s sister, Celedonia, a tall ungainly lass, was often ill.
All the family thought a great deal of Cæsar; his advice was followed at that house, and one of the operations on ‘change that he recommended making with some Foreign bonds that Ignacio’s mother was holding at the time of the Cuban War, gave everybody in the house an extraordinary idea of young Moncada’s financial talents.
Cæsar kept his balance among his separate activities; one set of studies complemented others. This diversity of points of view kept him from taking the false and one-sided position that those who preoccupy themselves with one branch of knowledge exclusively get into.
The one-sided position is most useful to a specialist, to a man who expects to remain satisfied in the place where chance has put him; but it is useless for one who proposes to enter life with his blood afire.
As almost always occurs, the projecting of ideas of distinct derivation and of different orders into the same plane, carried Cæsar into absolute scepticism, scepticism about things, and especially scepticism about the instrument of knowledge.
His negation had no reference,—far from it,—to women, to love, or to friends, things where the pedantic and ostentatious scepticism of literary men of the Larra type usually finds its fodder; his nihilism was much more the confusion and discomposure of one that explores a region well or badly, and finds no landmarks there, no paths, and returns with a belief that even the compass is not exact in what it shows.
“Nothing absolute exists,” Cæsar told himself, “neither science nor mathematics nor even the truth, can be an absolute thing.”
Arriving at this result surprised Cæsar a good deal. On finding that he was not successful in lighting on a philosophical system which would be a guide to him and which could be reasoned out like a theorem, he sought within the purely subjective for something that might satisfy him and serve as a standard.
A PHILOSOPHY
Toward the end of their course Cæsar presented himself one day in his friend Alzugaray’s office.