Some time soon after, Faust and Wagner are taking a walk outside the city gates. Consequently, he resolves to kill himself by drinking poison from a vial-but the sounds of church bells and heavenly music restore his will to live. However, Faust breaks off the discussion and dismisses his assistant he is sick to heart with verbiage, the monotony of intellectual pursuits, and he despairs of ever overcoming his limitations. Faust’s assistant in scholarship, Wagner, then enters the study, and he debates with his master on the values of book learning. He summons the Earth Spirit, the force that organizes and sustains nature, but the Spirit resents Faust’s arrogance and vanishes. And so, in his restlessness, he turns to magic, through the arts of which he hopes to understand the very inmost forces of the universe. He has studied and mastered all fields of human knowledge, from law to theology, but is nonetheless dissatisfied.
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