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people nearest to him who were good in their lives were believers. The
old prince, and Lvov, whom he liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch,
and all the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had
believed in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the
Russian people, all the working people for whose life he felt the deep-
est respect, believed.
Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many
scientific books, was that the men who shared his views had no other
construction to put on them, and that they gave no explanation of the
questions which he felt he could not live without answering, but sim-
ply ignored their existence and attempted to explain other questions
of no possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms, the
materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.
Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened
that seemed extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into
praying, and at the moment he prayed, he believed. But that moment
had passed, and he could not make his state of mind at that moment fit
into the rest of his life.
He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and
that now he was wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about
it, it all fell to pieces. He could not admit that he was mistaken then, for
his spiritual condition then was precious to him, and to admit that it
was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those moments.
He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual
forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.
Chapter 9.
These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stron-
ger from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and
the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt from the
aim he was pursuing.
Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become con-
vinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he had read
and reread thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic expla-
nation of life.
Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was
himself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially those of
the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought fat himself
a solution of problems, the same thing always happened. As long as he
followed the fixed definition of obscure words such as SPIRIT, WILL,
FREEDOM, ESSENCE, purposely letting himself go into the snare
of words the philosophers set for him, he seemed to comprehend some-
thing. But he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning, and to
turn from life itself to what had satisfied him while thinking in accor-
dance with the fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to
pieces at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the edifice
had been built up out of those transposed words, apart from anything