No one who in his way of thinking is conscious of having character can have such character by nature. Rather, it must always be acquired. We may also assume that the foundation of this character and its beginning will be unforgettable. It is like a kind of rebirth, like a certain solemn kind of promise to oneself. Education, examples, and teaching cannot gradually bring about this firmness and constancy in principles, but it comes about only through an explosion, as it were, which follows all at once upon the dissatisfaction with the state of vacillation of instinct. There will perhaps only be few who have tried to accomplish this revolution before their thirtieth year and even fewer who have firmly founded it before they are forty.