It is very ingenious. It seems nearer the truth than the guess, attributed to Moses, that everything was made in six days. But it does not answer the question that troubled Tolstoy, and the reply to it is obvious. If this self-acting process of evolution is going on — let it evolute! It will wipe me out whether I try to help it or to hinder it, and not me only, but all my friends, and my race, and the solar system to which I belong.
The vital question to Tolstoy was: “What am I here for?” And the question to which the scientists offered a partial reply was, “How did I get here?” — which is quite a different matter.
Tolstoy turned to the priests: the people whose special business it is to guide men’s conduct and tell them what they should, and what they should not, believe.
But the priests satisfied him as little as the scientists. For the problem that troubled him was a real problem, needing all man’s powers of mind to answer it; but the priests having, so to say, signed their thirty-nine articles, were not free to consider it with open minds. They would only think about the problems of life and death subject to the proviso that they should not have to budge from those points to which they were nailed down in advance. And it is no more possible to think efficiently in that way than it is to run well with your legs tied together.
The scientists put the wrong question; the priests accepted the real question, but were not free to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Moreover, the greatest and most obvious evil Tolstoy had seen in his life, was that pre-arranged, systematic, and wholesale method of murder called war. And he saw that the priests, with very few exceptions, not only did nothing to prevent such wholesale murder, but they even went, as chaplains, with the soldiers, to teach them Christianity without telling them it was wrong to fight; and they blessed ships of war, and prayed God to scatter our enemies, to confound their politics and to frustrate their knavish tricks. They would even say this kind of thing without knowing who the ‘enemies’ were. So long as they are not we, they must be bad and deserve to be ‘confounded.’
Nor was this all. Professing a religion of love, they harassed and persecuted those who professed any other forms of religious belief. In the way the different churches condemned each other, and struggled one against another, there was much that shocked him. Tolstoy tried hard to make himself think as the priests thought, but he was unable to do so.
Then he thought that perhaps if people could not tell him in words what the object of life is, he might find it out by watching their actions. And first he began to consider the lives of those of his own society: people of the middle and upper classes. He noticed among them people of different types.
First, there were those who led an animal life. Many of these were women, or healthy young men, full of physical life. The problem that troubled him no more troubled them than it troubles the ox or the ass. They evidently had not yet come to the stage of development to which life, thought, and experience had brought him, but he could not turn back and live as they lived.
Next came those who, though capable of thinking of serious things, were so occupied with their business, professional, literary, or governmental work, that they had no time to think about fundamental problems. One had his newspaper to get out each morning by five o’clock. Another had his diplomatic negotiations to pursue. A third was projecting a railway. They could not stop and think. They were so busy getting a living that they never asked why they lived?
Another large set of people, some of them thoughtful and conscientious people — were hypnotised by authority. Instead of thinking with their own heads and asking themselves the purpose of life, they accepted an answer given them by some one else: by some Church, or Pope, or book, or newspaper, or Emperor, or Minister. Many people are hypnotised by one or other of the Churches, and still more are hypnotised by patriotism and loyalty to their own country and their own rulers. In all nations — Russia, England, France, Germany, America, China and everywhere else — people may be found who know that it is not good to boast about their own qualities or to extol their own families, but who consider it a virtue to pretend that their nation is better than all other nations, and that their rulers, when they quarrel and fight with other rulers, are always in the right. People hypnotised in this way cease to think seriously about right or wrong, and, where their patriotism is concerned, are quite ready to accept the authority of anyone who to them typifies their Church or their country. However absurd such a state of mind may be, it keeps many people absorbed and occupied. How many people in France eagerly asserted the guilt of Dreyfus on the authority of General Mercier, and how many people in England were ready to fight and die rather than to agree to arbitration with the Transvaal after Chamberlain told them that arbitration was out of the question!
There were a fourth set of people, who seemed to Tolstoy the most contemptible of all. These were the epicureans: people who saw the emptiness and purposelessness of their lives, but said, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Belonging to the well-to-do classes and being materially better off than common people, they relied on this advantage and tried to snatch as much pleasure from life as they could.
None of these people could show Tolstoy the purpose of his life. He began to despair, and was more and more inclined to think suicide the best course open to a brave and sincere man.
But there were the peasants — for whom he had always felt great sympathy, and who lived all around him. How was it that they — poor, ignorant, heavily-taxed, compelled to serve in the army, and obliged to produce food, clothing and houses, not only for themselves but for all their superiors — how was it that they, on the whole, seemed to know the meaning of life? They did not commit suicide, but bore their hard lot patiently, and when death came met it with tranquillity. The more he thought about it, the more he saw that these country peasants, tilling the soil and producing those necessaries of life without which we should all starve, were living a comparatively good and natural life, doing what was obviously useful, and that they were nearer to a true understanding of life than the priests or the scribes. And he talked of these things with some of the best of such men, and found that, even if many of them could not express themselves clearly in words, they had firm ground under their feet. Some of them, too, were remarkably clear in thought and speech, free from superstition, and able to go to the roots of the matter. But to break free from the superstitions of science, and the prejudices of the ‘cultured crowd’ to which he belonged, was no easy matter even for Tolstoy, nor was it quickly accomplished.
When the peasants spoke to him of “serving God” and “not living for oneself,” it perplexed him. What is this “God”? How can I know whether he, or it, really exists? But the question: What is the meaning of my life? demanded an answer, and the peasants, by example as well as by words, helped him towards that answer.
He studied the sacred books of the East: the scriptures of the Chinese, of the Buddhists, and of the Mahommedans; but it was in the Gospels, to which the peasants referred him, that he found the meaning and purpose of life best and most clearly expressed. The fundamental truths concerning life and death and our relation to the unseen, are the same in all the great religious books of the East or of the West, but, for himself at least, Tolstoy found in the Gospels (though they contain many blunders, perversions and superstitions) the best, most helpful, and clearest expression of those truths.
He had always admired many passages in the Gospels, but had also found much that perplexed him. He now re-read them in the following way: the only way, he says, in which any sacred books can be profitably studied.
He first read them carefully through to see what they contained that was perfectly clear and simple, and that quite agreed with his own experience of life and accorded with his reason and conscience. Having found (and even marked in the margin with blue pencil) this core that had been expressed so plainly and strongly that it was easy to grasp, he read the four little books again several times over, and found that much that at first seemed obscure or