new consciousness which came to Tolstoi a few years later,
was born into existence through these terrible struggles and mental
agonies, inevitable because of the very nature of his heredity and
education and environment. Although as we know, he came of gentle-folk,
there was much of the Russian peasant in Tolstoi's makeup. His organism,
both as to physical and mental elements, was like a piece of solid iron,
untempered by the refining processes of an inherent spirituality. His
never-ceasing struggle for attainment of the degree of cosmic consciousness
which he finally reached was wholly an intellectual struggle. He possessed
such a power of analysis, such a depth of intellectual perception, that he
must needs go on or go mad with the strain of the question unanswered.

To such a mind, the admonition to "never mind about those questions; don't
think about them," fell upon dull ears. He could no more cease thinking
upon the mysteries of life and death than he could cease respiration. Nor
could he blindly trust. He must _know_. Nothing is more unescapable than
the soul's urge toward freedom--and freedom can be won only by liberation
from the bondage of illusion.

Tolstoi's friends and biographers agree that along about his forty-fifth
year, a great moral and religious change took place. The whole trend of his
thoughts turned from the mortal consciousness to that inner self whence
issues the higher qualities of mankind.

From a man who, although he was a great writer and a Russian nobleman, was
yet a man like others of his kind, influenced by traditionary ideas of
class and outward appearance; a man of conventional habits and ideas;
Tolstoi emerged a free soul. He shook off the illusion of historical life
and culture, and stood upon free, moral ground, estimating himself and his
fellows by means of an insight which ignores the world's conventions and
despises the world's standards of success. In short, Tolstoi had received
Illumination and henceforth should he reckoned among those of the new
birth.

In his own words, written in 1879, this change is described:

"Five years ago a change took place in me. I began to experience at first
times of mental vacuity, of cessation of life, as if I did not know why I
was to live or what I was to do. These suspensions of life always found
expression in the same problem, 'Why am I here?' and then 'What next?' I
had lived and lived and gone on and on till I had drawn near a precipice;