and convolutions, what is the good of sight, speech,
self-consciousness, genius, if it is all destined to depart into
the soil, and in the end to grow cold together with the earth's
crust, and then for millions of years to fly with the earth round
the sun with no meaning and no object? To do that there was no need
at all to draw man with his lofty, almost godlike intellect out of
non-existence, and then, as though in mockery, to turn him into
clay. The transmutation of substances! But what cowardice to comfort
oneself with that cheap substitute for immortality! The unconscious
processes that take place in nature are lower even than the stupidity
of man, since in stupidity there is, anyway, consciousness and will,
while in those processes there is absolutely nothing. Only the
coward who has more fear of death than dignity can comfort himself
with the fact that his body will in time live again in the grass,
in the stones, in the toad. To find one's immortality in the
transmutation of substances is as strange as to prophesy a brilliant
future for the case after a precious violin has been broken and
become useless.

When the clock struck, Andrey Yefimitch would sink back into his
chair and close his eyes to think a little. And under the influence
of the fine ideas of which he had been reading he would, unawares,
recall his past and his present. The past was hateful--better not
to think of it. And it was the same in the present as in the past.
He knew that at the very time when his thoughts were floating
together with the cooling earth round the sun, in the main building
beside his abode people were suffering in sickness and physical
impurity: someone perhaps could not sleep and was making war upon
the insects, someone was being infected by erysipelas, or moaning
over too tight a bandage; perhaps the patients were playing cards
with the nurses and drinking vodka. According to the yearly return,
twelve thousand people had been deceived; the whole hospital rested
as it had done twenty years ago on thieving, filth, scandals, gossip,
on gross quackery, and, as before, it was an immoral institution
extremely injurious to the health of the inhabitants. He knew that
Nikita knocked the patients about behind the barred windows of Ward
No. 6, and that Moiseika went about the town every day begging alms.

On the other hand, he knew very well that a magical change had taken
place in medicine during the last twenty-five years. When he