A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

Author:Leo Tolstoy [Tolstoy, Leo]
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Communism, Peta, God, Kingdom of God, Arthur Schopenhauer, The Kingdom of God is within you, Letter to a Hindu, Genius Alive, Yasnaya Polyana, War and Peace, Vegan, Sermon on the mount, Vegetarianism, Chertkov, Conversations with Leo Tolstoy, Bible, Count Leo Tolstoy, Vegetarian, Pacifism, My Religion, Free Age Press, Gandhi, Pacifist, Anna Karenina, Russia, The Gospel in brief, Non violence, What I believe, non resistance, On Life, Martin Luther King, Anti War, Jesus Christ, White Poppy, Christianity. A Confession, Peace movement, Russian Orthodox Church, Russian Revolution, The last station
Publisher: White Crow Productions Ltd
Published: 2010-01-21T06:45:55+00:00

Chapter 8

All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less clearly, I could not have then explained. I then only felt that, despite the logical certainty of my conclusions as to the inanity of life, and confirmed as they were by the greatest thinkers, there was something wrong in them. Whether in the conclusion itself, or in the way of putting the question, I did not know; I only felt that, though my reason was entirely convinced, that was not enough. All my reasoning could not induce me to act in accordance with my convictions, i.e., to kill myself. I should not speak the truth, if I said that my reason alone brought me to the position in which I was. Reason had been at work no doubt, but something else had worked too, something, which I can only call an instinctive consciousness of life. There also worked in me a force, which determined my attention to one thing rather than to another, and it was this that drew me out of my desperate position, and completely changed the current of my thoughts. This force led me to the idea that I, with thousands of other men like me, did not form the whole of mankind, – that I was still ignorant of what human life was.

When I watched the restricted circle of those who were my equals in social position, I saw only people who did not understand the question, people who kept down their understanding of it by the excitement of life, people who understood it and put an end to life, and people who, understanding, lived on through weakness, in despair. And I saw no others. It seemed to me that the small circle of learned, rich, and idle people, to which I myself belonged, formed the whole of humanity, and that the millions living outside it were animals, not men.

However strange, improbable, and inconceivable it now seems to me, that I, reasoning about life, could overlook the life of mankind surrounding me on all sides, and fall into such an error as to think that the life of a Solomon, a Schopenhauer, and my own, was alone real and fit, and the life lived by unconsidered millions, a circumstance unworthy of attention – however strange this appears to me now, I see that it was so then. Led away by intellectual pride, it seemed to me not to be doubted that I, with Solomon and Schopenhauer, had put the question so exactly and truly that there could be no other form of it; it seemed unquestionable that all these millions of men had failed to conceive the depth of the question, that I had sought the meaning of my life; and it never once occurred to me to think, “But what meaning has been given, what meaning is given now, by the millions of those who have lived and are living on earth?”

I long lived in this state

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