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invisible one” to wrestle with. He has become an atheist, he says, because he has noticed how the unknown powers leave the world to its fate without showing the least signs of life.

But at the same moment in which he, as a follower of the occult sciences, takes this purely atheistic stand, he conjures up the Great Invisible One. His entire metaphysical endeavor thus had this aim: the seeking after a God and a harmonious conception of God.

His Inferno-wandering shows many phenomena like those by which the psychic sufferer is beset; he suffers continually from the mania that he is pursued, a Russian by the name of Popoffsky (the Pole Przybyszewski) has come to Paris in company with his wife in order to murder Strindberg, and he announces this round about Strindberg’s hotel by playing Schumann’s Aufschwung etc.

But in spite of all this, Strindberg, in the midst of the chaos of these storms, retains that wonderful self-control, that sovereignty over himself which he owes to his artistic qualities and which finally brings him deliverance. When his occult friend, the practitioner of black arts, who calls himself Simeon Magus in their anonymous correspondence, wishes to influence Strindberg, he wards him off with real heroism. Magus preaches the denial and the destruction of the ego, but Strindberg answers that this is madness.

“What little I may possibly know,” says Strindberg, “emanates from my ego as the centre; the destruction of the ego is suicide.”