Part Eight: Chapter 8

by Leo Tolstoy

　　Ever since, by his beloved brother's deathbed, Levin had firstglanced into the questions of life and death in the light ofthese new convictions, as he called them, which had during theperiod from his twentieth to his thirty-fourth year imperceptiblyreplaced his childish and youthful beliefs--he had been strickenwith horror, not so much of death, as of life, without anyknowledge of whence, and why, and how, and what it was. Thephysical organization, its decay, the indestructibility ofmatter, the law of the conservation of energy, evolution, werethe words which usurped the place of his old belief. These wordsand the ideas associated with them were very well forintellectual purposes. But for life they yielded nothing, andLevin felt suddenly like a man who has changed his warm fur cloakfor a muslin garment, and going for the first time into the frostis immediately convinced, not by reason, but by his whole naturethat he is as good as naked, and that he must infallibly perishmiserably.

　　From that moment, though he did not distinctly face it, and stillwent on living as before, Levin had never lost this sense ofterror at his lack of knowledge.

　　He vaguely felt, too, that what he called his new convictionswere not merely lack of knowledge, but that they were part of awhole order of ideas, in which no knowledge of what he needed waspossible.

　　At first, marriage, with the new joys and duties bound up withit, had completely crowded out these thoughts. But of late,while he was staying in Moscow after his wife's confinement, withnothing to do, the question that clamored for solution had moreand more often, more and more insistently, haunted Levin's mind.

　　The question was summed up for him thus: "If I do not accept theanswers Christianity gives to the problems of my life, whatanswers do I accept?" And in the whole arsenal of hisconvictions, so far from finding any satisfactory answers, he wasutterly unable to find anything at all like an answer.

　　He was in the position of a man seeking food in toy shops andtool shops.

　　Istinctively, unconsciously, with every book, with everyconversation, with every man he met, he was on the lookout forlight on these questions and their solution.

　　What puzzled and distracted him above everything was that themajority of men of his age and circle had, like him, exchangedtheir old beliefs for the same new convictions, and yet sawnothing to lament in this, and were perfectly satisfied andserene. So that, apart from the principal question, Levin wastortured by other questions too. Were these people sincere? heasked himself, or were they playing a part? or was it that theyunderstood the answers science gave to these problems in somedifferent, clearer sense than he did? And he assiduously studiedboth these men's opinions and the books which treated of thesescientific explanations.

　　One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed hismind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from therecollections of the circle of his young days at college, thatreligion had outlived its day, and that it was now practicallynon-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good intheir lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom heliked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, and all the women believed,and his wife believed as simply as he had believed in hisearliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russianpeople, all the working people for whose life he felt the deepestrespect, believed.

　　Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading manyscientific books, was that the men who shared his views had noother construction to put on them, and that they gave noexplanation of the questions which he felt he could not livewithout answering, but simply ignored their existence andattempted to explain other questions of no possible interest tohim, such as the evolution of organisms, the materialistic theoryof consciousness, and so forth.

　　Moreover, during his wife's confinement, something had happenedthat seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had falleninto praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But thatmoment had passed, and he could not make his state of mind atthat moment fit into the rest of his life.

　　He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, andthat now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmlyabout it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he wasmistaken then, for his spiritual condition then was precious tohim, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have beento desecrate those moments. He was miserably divided againsthimself, and strained all his spiritual forces to the utmost toescape from this condition.