truth.

I remember that I was once walking along the street in Moscow, and in
front of me I saw a man come out and gaze attentively at the stones of
the sidewalk, after which he selected one stone, seated himself on it,
and began to plane (as it seemed to me) or to rub it with the greatest
diligence and force. "What is he doing to the sidewalk?" I said to
myself. On going close to him, I saw what the man was doing. He was a
young fellow from a meat-shop; he was whetting his knife on the stone of
the pavement. He was not thinking at all of the stones when he
scrutinized them, still less was he thinking of them when he was
accomplishing his task: he was whetting his knife. He was obliged to
whet his knife so that he could cut the meat; but to me it seemed as
though he were doing something to the stones of the sidewalk. Just so it
appears as though humanity were occupied with commerce, conventions,
wars, sciences, arts; but only one business is of importance to it, and
with only one business is it occupied: it is elucidating to itself those
moral laws by which it lives. The moral laws are already in existence;
humanity is only elucidating them, and this elucidation seems unimportant
and imperceptible for any one who has no need of moral laws, who does not
wish to live by them. But this elucidation of the moral law is not only
weighty, but the only real business of all humanity. This elucidation is
imperceptible just as the difference between the dull and the sharp knife
is imperceptible. The knife is a knife all the same, and for a person
who is not obliged to cut any thing with this knife, the difference
between the dull and the sharp one is imperceptible. For the man who has
come to an understanding that his whole life depends on the greater or
less degree of sharpness in the knife,--for such a man, every whetting of
it is weighty, and that man knows that the knife is a knife only when it
is sharp, when it cuts that which needs cutting.

This is what happened to me, when I began to write my essay. It seemed
to me that I knew all about it, that I understood every thing connected
with those questions which had produced on me the impressions of the
Lyapinsky house, and the census; but when I attempted to take account of
them and to demonstrate them, it turned out that the knife would not cut,
and that it must be whetted. And it is only now, after the lapse of
three years, that I have felt that my knife is suff