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give an answer to my question—it is incommensurable with my ques-
tion. The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of
what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledge I did not arrive
at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, GIVEN, because I could
not have got it from anywhere.
“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at
knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told
that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was
already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason
discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to
oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires. That is the
deduction of reason. But loving one’s neighbor reason could never
discover, because it’s irrational.”
Chapter 13.
And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between
Dolly and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun
cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s
mouths with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks,
began reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief
gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their
sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to
drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have
nothing to eat, and die of hunger.
And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with
which the children heard what their mother said to them. They were
simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did
not believe a word of what their mother was saying. They could not
believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they
habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were
destroying was the very thing they lived by.
“That all comes of itself,” they thought, “and there’s nothing inter-
esting or important about it because it has always been so, and always
will be so. And it’s all always the same. We’ve no need to think about
that, it’s all ready. But we want to invent something of our own, and
new. So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking them