of what I do to-day? Of what
I shall do to-morrow? What will be the outcome of all my life? Why
should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there in life any purpose
which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?

"These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child
to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being.
Without an answer to them, it is impossible, as I experienced, for life
to go on.

"'But perhaps,' I often said to myself, 'there may be something I have
failed to notice or to comprehend. It is not possible that this
condition of despair should be natural to mankind.' And I sought for an
explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I
questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I
sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days
and nights together. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save
himself--and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all
those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also
found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that
the very thing which was leading me to despair--the meaningless
absurdity of life--is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to
man."

To prove this point, Tolstoy quotes the Buddha, Solomon, and
Schopenhauer. And he finds only four ways in which men of his own
class and society are accustomed to meet the situation. Either mere
animal blindness, sucking the honey without seeing the dragon or the
mice--"and from such a way," he says, "I can learn nothing, after what
I now know;" or reflective epicureanism, snatching what it can while
the day lasts--which is only a more deliberate sort of stupefaction
than the first; or manly suicide; or seeing the mice and dragon and yet
weakly and plaintively clinging to the bush of life. Suicide was
naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect.

"Yet," says Tolstoy, "whilst my intellect was working, something else
in me was working too, and kept me from the deed--a consciousness of
life, as I may call it, which was like a force that obliged my mind to
fix itself in another direction and draw me out of my situation of
despair.... During the whole course of this year, when I almost
unceasingly kept asking myself how to end the business, whether by the
rope or by the bullet, during all that time, alongside of all those
m