Part Eight: Chapter 9

by Leo Tolstoy

　　These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or strongerfrom time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought,and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he feltfrom the aim he was pursuing.

　　Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had becomeconvinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, hehad read and reread thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling,Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave anon-materialistic explanation of life.

　　Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or washimself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especiallythose of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read orsought fat himself a solution of problems, the same thing alwayshappened. As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscurewords such as spirit, will, freedom, essence, purposely lettinghimself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him,he seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget theartificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself towhat had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with thefixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to piecesat once like a house of cards, and it became clear that theedifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apartfrom anything in life more important than reason.

　　At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his willthe word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophycharmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But then,when he turned from life itself to glance at it again, it fellaway too, and proved to be the same muslin garment with no warmthin it.

　　His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theologicalworks of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov'sworks, and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentativestyle which at first repelled him, he was impressed by thedoctrine of the church he found in them. He was struck at firstby the idea that the apprehension of divine truths had not beenvouchsafed to man, but to a corporation of men bound together bylove--to the church. What delighted him was the thought how mucheasier it was to believe in a still existing living church,embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head, andtherefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept the faith inGod, in the creation, the fall, the redemption, than to beginwith God, a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. Butafterwards, on reading a Catholic writer's history of the church,and then a Greek orthodox writer's history of the church, andseeing that the two churches, in their very conceptioninfallible, each deny the authority of the other, Homiakov'sdoctrine of the church lost all its charm for him, and thisedifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers' edifices.

　　All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearfulmoments of horror.

　　"Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible;and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said tohimself.

　　"In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, isformed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while andbursts, and that bubble is Me."

　　It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result ofages of human thought in that direction.

　　This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaboratedby human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. Itwas the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levinhad unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as anywaythe clearest, and made it his own.

　　But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of somewicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could notsubmit.

　　He must escape from this power. And the means of escape everyman had in his own hands. He had but to cut short thisdependence on evil. And there was one means--death.

　　And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, wasseveral times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he mightnot be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with hisgun for fear of shooting himself.

　　But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; hewent on living.