PART I Zu fragmentarish ist Welt und Leben._All Things are PossibleTXT全文阅读

h. heine.

the obscure streets of life do not offer the conveniences of the central thoroughfares: no electric light, no gas, not even a kerosene lamp-bracket. there are no pavements: the traveller has to fumble his way in the dark. if he needs a light, he must wait for a thunderbolt, or else, primitive-wise, knock a spark out of a stone. in a glimpse will appear unfamiliar outlines; and then, what he has taken in he must try to remember, no matter whether the impression was right or false. for he will not easily get another light, except he run his head against a wall, and see sparks that way. what can a wretched pedestrian gather under such circumstances? how can we expect a clear account from him whose curiosity (let us suppose his curiosity so strong) led him to grope his way among the outskirts of life? why should we try to compare his records with those of the travellers through brilliant streets?

the law of sequence in natural phenomena seems so plausible, so obvious, that one is tempted to look for its origin, not in the realities of actual life, but in the promptings of the human mind. this law of sequence is the most mysterious of all the natural laws. why so much order? why not chaos and disorderliness? really, if the hypothesis of sequence had not offered such blatant advantages to the human intelligence, man would never have thought of raising it to the rank of eternal and irrefutable truth. but he saw his opportunity. thanks to the grand hypothesis, man is forewarned and forearmed. thanks to this master-key, the future is at his mercy. he knows, in order that he may foreknow: savoir pour prévoir. here, is man, by virtue of one supreme assumption, dictator henceforward of all nature. the philosophers have ever bowed the knee to success. so down they went before the newly-invented law of natural sequence, they hailed it with the title of eternal truth. but even this seemed insufficient. l'appétit vient en mangeant. like the old woman in the fairy-tale about the golden fish, they had it in their minds that the fish should do their errands. but some few people at last could not stand this impudence. some very few began to object....

the comfortable settled man says to himself: "how could, one live without being sure of the morrow; how could one sleep without a roof over one's head?" but misfortune turns him out of house and home. he must perforce sleep under a hedge. he cannot rest, he is full of terrors. there may be wild beasts, fellow-tramps. but in the long run he gets used to it. he will trust himself to chance, live like a tramp, and sleep his sleep in a ditch.

a writer, particularly a young and inexperienced writer, feels himself under an obligation to give his reader the fullest answers to all possible questions. conscience will not let him shut his eyes to tormenting problems, and so he begins to speak of "first and ultimate things." as he cannot say anything profitable on such subjects—for it is not the business of the young to be profoundly philosophical—he grows excited, he shouts himself to hoarseness. in the end he is silent from exhaustion. and then, if his words have had any success with the public, he is astonished to find that he has become a prophet. whereupon, if he be an average sort of person, he is filled with an insatiable desire to preserve his influence till the end of his days. but if he be more sensitive or gifted than usual, he begins to despise the crowd for its vulgar credulity, and himself for having posed in the stupid and disgraceful character of a clown of lofty ideas.

how painful it is to read plato's account of the last conversations of socrates! the days, even the hours of the old man are numbered, and yet he talks, talks, talks.... crito comes to him in the early morning and tells him that the sacred ships will shortly return to athens. and at once socrates is ready to talk, to argue.... it is possible, of course, that plato is not altogether to be trusted. it is said that socrates observed, of the dialogues already written down by plato. "how much that youth has belied me!" but then from all sources we have it, that socrates spent the month following his verdict in incessant conversations with his pupils and friends. that is what it is to be a beloved master, and to have disciples. you can't even die quietly.... the best death is really the one which is considered the worst: to die alone, in a foreign land, in a poor-house, or, as they say, like a dog under a hedge. then at least one may spend one's last moments honestly, without dissembling or ostentation, preparing oneself for the dreadful, or wonderful, event. pascal, as his sister tells us, also talked a great deal before his death, and de musset cried like a baby. perhaps socrates and pascal talked so much, for fear they should start crying. it is a false shame!

the fact that some ideas, or some series of ideas, are materially unprofitable to mankind cannot serve as a justification for their rejection. once an idea is there, the gates must be opened to it. for if you close the gates, the thought will force a way in, or, like the fly in the fable, will sneak through unawares. ideas have no regard for our laws of honour or morality. take for example realism in literature. at its appearance it aroused universal indignation. why need we know the dirt of life? and honestly, there is no need. realism could give no straightforward justification for itself. but, as it had to come through, it was ready with a lie; it compared itself to pathology, called itself useful, beneficial, and so obtained a place. we can all see now that realism is not beneficial, but harmful, very harmful, and that it has nothing in common with pathology. nevertheless, it is no longer easy to drive it from its place. the prohibition evaded, there is now the justus titulus possessions.

count tolstoy preached inaction. it seems he had no need. we "inact" remarkably. idleness, just that idleness tolstoy dreamed of, a free, conscious idling that despises labour, this is one of the chief characteristics of our time. of course i speak of the higher, cultured classes, the aristocracy of spirit—"we write books, paint pictures, compose symphonies"—but is that labour? it is only the amusement of idleness. so that tolstoy is much more to the point when, forgetting his preaching of inaction, he bids us trudge eight hours a day at the tail of the plough. in this there is some sense. idleness spoils us. we were returning to the most primitive of all the states of our forefathers. like paradisal adam and eve, having no need to sweat for our bread, we were trying to pilfer the fruit from the forbidden tree. truly we received a similar punishment. divine laws are inscrutable. in paradise everything is permitted, except curiosity. even labour is allowed, though it is not obligatory, as it is outside. tolstoy realised the dangers of the paradisal state. he stooped to talk of inaction for a moment—and then he began to work. since in regular, smooth, constant, rhythmical labour, whether it is efficient or whether it merely appears efficient, like tolstoy's farming, there is peace of mind. look at the industrious germans, who begin and who end their day with a prayer. in paradise, where there is no labour, and no need for long rest and heavy sleep, all temptations become dangerous. it is a peril to live there.... perhaps present-day people eschew the paradisal state. they prefer work, for where there is no work there is no smoothness, no regularity, no peacefulness, no satisfaction. in eden, even the well-informed individuals cannot tell what will come next, savoir pour prévoir does not answer, and everlasting laws are exposed to ridicule. amongst ourselves also a few of the work-abjurors, the idlers, are beginning to question our established knowledge. but the majority of men, and particularly germans, still defend a priori judgments, on the ground that without these, perfect knowledge would be impossible, there could be no regulation of the course of natural phenomena, and no looking ahead.

to escape from the grasp of contemporary ruling ideas, one should study history. the lives of other men in other lands in other ages teach us to realise that our "eternal laws" and infallible ideas are just abortions. take a step further, imagine mankind living elsewhere than on this earth, and all our terrestial eternalities lose their charm.

we know nothing of the ultimate realities of our existence, nor shall we ever know anything. let that be agreed. but it does not follow that therefore we must accept some or other dogmatic theory as a modus vivendi, no, not even positivism, which has such a sceptical face on it. it only follows that man is free to change his conception of the universe as often as he changes his boots or his gloves, and that constancy of principle belongs only to one's relationships with other people, in order that they may know where and to what extent they may depend on us. therefore, on principle man should respect order in the external world and complete chaos in the inner. and for those who find it difficult to bear such a duality, some internal order might also be provided. only, they should not pride themselves on it, but always remember that it is a sign of their weakness, pettiness, dullness.

the pythagoreans assumed that the sun is motionless and that the earth turns round. what a long time the truth had to wait for recognition!

in spite of epicurus and his exasperation we are forced to admit that anything whatsoever may result from anything whatsoever. which does not mean, however, that a stone ever turned into bread, or that our visible universe was ever "naturally" formed from nebulous puffs. but from our own minds and our own experience we can deduce nothing that would serve us as a ground for setting even the smallest limit to nature's own arbitrary behaviour. if whatever happens now had chanced to happen quite differently, it would not, therefore, have seemed any the less natural to us. in other words, although there may be an element of inevitability in our human judgments concerning the natural phenomena, we have never been able and probably never shall be able to separate the grain of inevitable from the chaff of accidental and casual truth. moreover, we do not even know which is more essential and important, the inevitable or the casual. hence we are forced to the conclusion that philosophy must give up her attempt at finding the veritates aeternae. the business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty—man who is supremely afraid of uncertainty, and who is forever hiding himself behind this or the other dogma. more briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.

when man finds in himself a certain defect, of which he can by no means rid himself, there remains but to accept the so-called failing as a natural quality. the more grave and important the defect, the more urgent is the need to ennoble it. from sublime to ridiculous is only one step, and an ineradicable vice in strong men is always rechristened a virtue.

on the whole, there is little to choose between metaphysics and positivism. in each there is the same horizon, but the composition and colouring are different. positivism chooses grey, colourless paint and ordinary composition; metaphysics prefers brilliant colouring and complicated design, and always carries the vision away into the infinite; in which trick it often succeeds, owing to its skill in perspective. but the canvas is impervious, there is no melting through it into "the other world." nevertheless, skilful perspectives are very alluring, so that metaphysicians will still have something to quarrel about with the positivists.

the task of a writer: to go forward and share his impressions with his reader. in spite of everything to the contrary, he is not obliged to prove anything. but, because every step of his progress is dogged by those police agents, morality, science, logic, and so forth, he needs always to have ready some sort of argument with which to frustrate them. there is no necessity to trouble too deeply about the quality of the argumentation. why fret about being "inwardly right." it is quite enough if the reasoning which comes handiest will succeed in occupying those guardians of the verbal highways whose intention it is to obstruct his passage.

the secret of poushkin's "inner harmony."—to poushkin nothing was hopeless. nay, he saw hopeful signs in everything. it is agreeable to sin, and it is just as delightful to repent. it is good to doubt, but it is still better to believe. it is jolly "with feet shod in steel" to skate the ice, it is pleasant to wander about with gypsies, to pray in church, to quarrel with a friend, to make peace with an enemy, to swoon on waves of harmony, to weep over a passing fancy, to recall the past, to peep into the future. poushkin could cry hot tears, and he who can weep can hope. "i want to live, so that i may think and suffer," he says; and it seems as if the word "to suffer," which is so beautiful in the poem, just fell in accidentally, because there was no better rhyme in russian for "to die." the later verses, which are intended to amplify to think and to suffer, prove this. poushkin might repeat the words of the ancient hero: "danger is dangerous to others, but not to me." therein lies the secret of his harmonious moods.

the well-trodden field of contemporary thought should be dug up. therefore, on every possible occasion, in season and out, the generally-accepted truths must be ridiculed to death, and paradoxes uttered in their place. then we shall see....

what is a weltanschauung, a world-conception, a philosophy? as we all know, turgenev was a realist, and from the first he tried to portray life truthfully. although we had had no precise exponents of realism, yet after poushkin it was impossible for a russian writer to depart too far from actuality. even those who did not know what to do with "real life" had to cope with it as best they could. hence, in order that the picture of life should not prove too depressing, the writer must provide himself in due season with a philosophy. this philosophy still plays the part of the magic wand in literature, enabling the author to turn anything he likes into anything else.

most of turgenev's works are curious in respect of philosophy. but most curious is his diary of a superfluous man. turgenev was the first to introduce the term "a superfluous man" into russian literature. since then an endless amount has been written about superfluous people, although up till now nothing important has been added to what was already said fifty years ago. there are superfluous people, plenty of them. but what is to be done with them? no one knows. there remains only to invent philosophies on their behalf. in 1850 turgenev, then a young man, thus solved the problem. he ends the diary—with a humorous postscript, supposed to have been scribbled by an impertinent reader on the last fly-leaf of the ms.

this ms. was ready and contents thereof disapproved,

by peter zudotyeshin. m.m.m.m.

dear sir, peter zudotyeshin, my dear sir.

it is obvious turgenev felt that after a tragedy must follow a farce, and therein lies the substance of his philosophy. it is also obvious that in this feeling he has the whole of european civilisation behind him. turgenev was the most educated, the most cultured of all russian writers. he spent nearly all his life abroad, and absorbed into himself all that european learning could offer. he knew this, although he never directly admitted it, owing to an exaggerated modesty which sometimes irritates us by its obviousness. he believed profoundly that only learning, only european science could open men's eyes to life, and explain all that needed explanation. according to this belief he judges even tolstoy. "the saddest instance of the lack of real freedom," the sixty-year-old turgenev writes of war and peace, in his literary memoirs: "the saddest instance of the lack of real freedom, arising from the lack of real knowledge, is revealed to us in leo tolstoy's latest work, a work which at the same time, by virtue of its creative, poetic force, ranks almost first among all that has appeared in russian literature since 1840. no! without culture, without freedom in the widest sense, freedom within oneself, freedom from preconceived ideas, freedom with regard to one's own nation and history, without this, the real artist is unthinkable; without this free air he cannot breathe." listening to turgenev one might imagine that he had learned some great secret in the west, a secret which gave him the right to bear himself cheerfully and modestly when other people despaired and lost their heads.... a year after the writing of the literary memoirs above quoted, turgenev happened to be present at the execution of the notorious murderer, tropman. his impressions are superbly rendered in a long article called "tropman's execution." the description produces a soul-shaking effect upon the reader; for i think i shall not exaggerate if i say that the essay is one of the best, at least one of the most vigorous of turgenev's writings. it is true that tolstoy describes scenes of slaughter with no less vigour, and therefore the reader need not yield too much to the artist's power. yet when turgenev relates that, at the decisive moment, when the executioners like spiders on a fly threw themselves on tropman and bore him to the ground—"the earth quietly swam away from under my feet"—we are forced to believe him. men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the savage, crying incongruity and ghastliness of our condition suddenly reveals itself vivid before our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. then the ground slides away from under our feet. but not for long. the horror of the sensation of groundlessness quickly brings man to himself. he must forget everything, he must only get his feet on earth again. in this sense turgenev proved himself in as risky a state at sixty as he was when, as a young man, he wrote his diary of a superfluous man. the description of tropman's execution ends with these words: "who can fail to feel that the question of capital punishment is one of the urgent, immediate problems which modern humanity must settle? i shall be satisfied ... if my story will provide even a few arguments for those who advocate the abolition, or at least the suppression of the publicity of capital punishments." again the mountain has brought forth a mouse. after a tragedy, a farce. philosophy enters into her power, and the earth returns under one's feet.

i emphasise and repeat: turgenev is not alone responsible for his attitude. with his lips speaks the whole of european civilisation. on principle all insoluble problems are rejected. during her thousand years of experience, the old civilisation has acquired the skill which allows her children to derive satisfaction and benefit out of anything, even the blood of their neighbour. even the greatest horrors, even crimes are beneficial, properly construed. turgenev was, as we know, a soft, "humane" man, an undoubted idealist. in his youth he had been through the hegelian school. and from hegel he learned what an enormous value education has, and how supremely important it is for an educated man to have a complete and finished—most certainly a "finished" philosophy.

to praise oneself is considered improper, immodest; to praise one's own sect, one's own philosophy, is considered the highest duty. even the best writers have taken at least as much trouble to glorify their philosophy as to found it, and have always had more success in the former case than in the latter. their ideas, whether proven or not, are the dearest possession in life to them, in sorrow a consolation, in difficulty a source of counsel. even death is not terrible to ideas; they will follow man beyond the grave, they are the only imperishable riches. all this the philosophers repeat, very eloquently repeat and reiterate concerning their ideas, not less skilfully than advocates plead their cases on behalf of thieves and swindlers. but nobody has ever yet called a philosopher "a hired conscience," though everybody gives the lawyer this nickname. why this partiality?

certain savage tribes believe that their kings need no food, neither to eat nor to drink. as a matter of fact, kings eat and drink, and even relish a good mouthful more than ordinary mortals. so, having no desire, even for the sake of form, to abstain too long, they not infrequently interrupt the long-drawn-out religious ceremonies of their tribes, in order to command refreshment for their frail bodies. but none must witness, or even be aware of this refreshing, and so while he eats the king is hidden within a purple pall. metaphysicians remind one of these savage kings. they want everyone to believe that empiricism, which means all reality and substantial existence, is nothing to them, they need only pure ideas for their existence. in order to keep up this fiction, they appear before the world invested in a purple veil of fine words. the crowd knows perfectly well that it is all a take-in, but since it likes shows and bright colours, and since also it has no ambition to appear too knowing, it rarely betrays that it has caught the trick of the comedy. on the contrary, it loves to pretend to be fooled, knowing by instinct that actors always do their best when the audience believes implicitly in what happens. only inexperienced youths and children, unaware of the great importance of the conventional attitude, now and then cry out in indignation and give the lie to the performance: like the child in andersen's story, who so unexpectedly and inopportunely broke the general, deliberate illusion by calling out—"but the king is naked." of course everybody knows without telling that the king is naked: that the metaphysicians not only are unable to explain anything, but that hitherto they have not been able to present even a single hypothesis free from contradiction. it is necessary to pretend to believe that kings eat nothing, that philosophers have divined the secrets of the universe, that arbitrary theories are more precious than empirical harvests, and so on. there remains only one difficulty: grownups may be won over to the conventional lie, but what about the children? with them the only remedy is the pythagorean system of upbringing, so glorified by hegel. children must keep silent and not raise their voice until they realise that some things may not be talked about. this is our method. with us pupils remain silent, not only for five years, as the pythagoreans recommended, but for ten or more—until they have learned to speak like their masters. and then they are granted a freedom which is no longer any good to them. perhaps they had wings, or might have had them, but they have crawled all their life long in imitation of their masters, so how can they now dream of flight? to a well-informed man, who has studied much, the very thought of the possibility of tearing himself away from the earth, even for a moment, is horrifying: as if he knew beforehand what the result would be.

the best, the most effective way of convincing a reader is to begin one's argument with inoffensive, commonplace assertions. when suspicion has been sufficiently lulled, and a certainty has been begot that what follows will be a confirmation of the readers own accepted views—then has the moment arrived to speak one's mind openly, but still in the same easy tone, as if there were no break in the flow of truisms. the logical connection is unimportant. consequence of manner and intonation is much more impressive than consequence of ideas. the thing to do is to go on, in the same suave tone, from uttering a series of banalities to expressing a new and dangerous thought, without any break. if you succeed in this, the business is done. the reader will not forget—the new words will plague and torment him until he has accepted them.

the habit of logical thinking kills imagination. man is convinced that the only way to truth is through logic, and that any departure from this way leads to error and absurdity. the nearer we approach the ultimate questions of existence, in our departure from logicality, the more deadly becomes the state of error we fall into. the ariadne ball has become all unwound long ago, and man is at the end of the tether. but he does not know, he holds the end of the thread firmly, and marks time with energy on the same spot, imagining his progress, and little realising the ridiculous situation into which he has fallen. how should he realise, considering the innumerable precautions he has taken to prevent himself from losing the logical way? he had better have stayed at home. once he set out, once he decided to be a theseus and kill the minotaur, he should have given himself up, forfeited the old attachment, and been ready never to escape from the labyrinth. true, he would have risked losing ariadne: and this is why long journeys should be undertaken only after family connections have become a burden. such being the case, a man deliberately cuts the thread which binds him to hearth and home, so that he may have a legitimate excuse to his conscience for not going back. philosophy must have nothing in common with logic; philosophy is an art which aims at breaking the logical continuity of argument and bringing man out on the shoreless sea of imagination, the fantastic tides where everything is equally possible and impossible. certainly it is difficult, given sedentary habits of life, to be a good philosopher. the fact that the fate of philosophy has ever lain in the hands of professors can only be explained by the reluctance of the envious gods to give omniscience to mortals. whilst stay-at-home persons are searching for truth, the apple will stay on the tree. the business must be undertaken by homeless adventurers, born nomads, to whom ubi bene ibi patria. it seems to me that but for his family and his domesticity, count tolstoy, who lives to such a ripe old age, might have told us a great many important and interesting things. or, perhaps, had he not married, like nietzsche he would have gone mad. "if you turn to the right, you will marry, if to the left, you will be killed." a true philosopher never chooses the middle course; he needs no riches, he does not know what to do with money. but whether he turns to the right or to the left, nothing pleasant awaits him.

scratch a russian and you will find a tartar. culture is an age-long development, and sudden grafting of it upon a race rarely succeeds. to us in russia, civilisation came suddenly, whilst we were still savages. at once she took upon herself the responsibilities of a tamer of wild animals, first working with decoys and baits, and later, when she felt her power, with threats. we quickly submitted. in a short time we were swallowing in enormous doses those poisons which europe had been gradually accustoming herself to, gradually assimilating through centuries. thanks to which, the transplanting of civilisation into russia turns out to be no mild affair. a russian had only to catch a whiff of european atmosphere, and his head began to swim. he interpreted in his own way, savage-like, whatever he heard of western success. hearing about railways, agricultural machines, schools, municipalities, his imagination painted miracles: universal happiness, boundless freedom, paradise, wings, etc. and the more impossible his dreams, the more eager he was to believe them real. how disillusioned with europe the westerner herzen became, after living for years on end abroad! yet, with all his acuteness, it did not occur to him that europe was not in the least to blame for his disillusionment. europe had dropped miracles ages ago; she contented herself with ideals. it is we in russia who will go on confusing miracles with ideals, as if the two were identical, whereas they have nothing to do with each other. as a matter of fact, just because europe had ceased to believe in miracles, and realised that all human problems resolve down to mere arrangements here on earth, ideas and ideals had been invented. but the russian bear crept out of his hole and strolled to europe for the elixir of life, the flying carpet, the seven-leagued shoes, and so on, thinking in all his na?veté that railways and electricity were signs which clearly proved that the old nurse never told a lie in her fairy tales.... all this happened just at the moment when europe had finally made away with alchemy and astrology, and started on the positive researches resulting in chemistry and astronomy.

the first assumption of all metaphysics is, that by dialectic development of any concept a whole system can be evolved. of course the initial concept, the a priori, is generally unsound, so there is no need to mention the deductions. but since it is very difficult in the realm of abstract thought to distinguish a lie from truth, metaphysical systems often have a very convincing appearance. the chief defect only appears incidentally, when the taste for dialectic play becomes blunted in man, as it did in turgenev towards the end of his life, so that he realises the uselessness of philosophical systems. it is related that a famous mathematician, after hearing a musical symphony to the end, inquired, "what does it prove?" of course, it proves nothing, except that the mathematician had no taste for music. and to him who has no taste for dialectics, metaphysics can prove nothing, either. therefore, those who are interested in the success of metaphysics must always encourage the opinion that a taste for dialectics is a high distinction in a man, proving the loftiness of his soul.

man is used to having convictions, so there we are. we can none of us do without our hangers-on, though we despise them at the bottom of our souls.

socrates and plato tried to determine under the shifting change of appearance the immutable, unchanging reality. in the platonic "ideas" the attempt was incarnated. the visible reality, never true to itself, assuming numberless varying forms, this is not the genuine reality. that which is real must be constant. hence the ideas of objects are real, and the objects themselves are fictitious. thus the root of the platonic philosophy appears to be a fundamental defect in human reasoning—a defect regarded as the highest merit. it is difficult for the philosopher to get a good grasp of this agitated, capricious life, and so he decides that it is not life at all, but a figment. dialectics is supreme only over general concepts—and the general concepts are promoted to an ideal. since plato and socrates, only such philosophers have succeeded largely who have taught that the unchangeable is preferable to the changeable, the eternal to the temporal. the ordinary individual, who lives unconsciously, never reckoning his spiritual credit against his spiritual debit, naturally regards the philosopher as his legitimate book-keeper, keeper of the soul's accounts. already in greece the athenian youth watched with passionate interest the dexterity which socrates displayed in his endeavour to restore by means of dialectics the lost "ultimate foundations" of human conduct. now in book-keeping, as we are aware, not a single farthing must disappear untraceably. socrates was trying to come up to expectations. the balance between man's spiritual assets and liabilities was with him ideally established. perhaps in this lies the secret of that strange attraction he exerted even over such volatile and unsteady natures as that of alcibiades, drawing the young men to him so that they were attached to him with all their soul. alcibiades had long since lost all count of his spiritual estate, and therefore from time to time he had need to recourse to socrates, who by speeches and dissertations could bring order into chaos and harmony into the spiritual confusion of his young friend. alcibiades turned to socrates to be relieved. of course, he sought relief in order that he might begin again his riotous living: rest is so sweet to a tired man. but to conclude that because alcibiades exhausted himself, and because rest is sweet, therefore all men must rest, this is absurd. yet socrates dictated this conclusion, in all his ideas. he wished that all men should rest, rest through eternity, that they should see their highest fulfilment in this resting. it is easier to judge of socrates since we have count tolstoy with us. probably the physiognomist topir would say of tolstoy as he said of socrates, that there are many evil propensities lurking in him. topir is not here to speak, but tolstoy has told us himself how wicked he found his own nature, how he had to struggle with it. tolstoy is not naturally over-courageous; by long effort he has trained himself to be bold. how afraid of death he was in his youth and how cleverly he could conceal that fear. later on, in mature age, it was still the fear of death which inspired him to write his confession. he was conquering that fear, and with it all other fears. for he felt that, since fear is very difficult to master in oneself, man must be a much higher being when he has learned not to be afraid any more. meanwhile, who knows? perhaps "cowardice," that miserable, despicable, much-abused weakness of the underworld, is not such a vice after all. perhaps it is even a virtue. think of dostoevsky and his heroes, think of hamlet. if the underworld man in us were afraid of nothing, if hamlet was naturally a gladiator, then we should have neither tragic poetry nor philosophy. it is a platitude, that fear of death has been the inspiration of philosophers. numberless quotations could be drawn from ancient and modern writers, if they were necessary. maybe the poetic daimon of socrates, which made him wise, was only fear personified. or perhaps it was his dark dreams. that which troubled him by day did not quit him by night. even after the sentence of death socrates dreamed that he ought to engage in the arts, so in order not to provoke the gods he began to compose verses, at the age of seventy. tolstoy also at the age of fifty began to perform good deeds, to which performance he had previously given not the slightest attention. if it were our custom nowadays to express ourselves mythologically, we should no doubt hear tolstoy telling us about his daimon or his dreams. instead he squares his accounts with science and morality, in place of gods or demons. many a present-day alcibiades, who laves all the week in the muddy waters of life, comes on sundays to cleanse himself in the pure stream of tolstoyian ideas. book-keeping is satisfied with this modest success, and assumes that if it commands universal attention one day in the week, then obviously it is the sum and essence of life, beyond which man needs nothing. on the same grounds the keepers of public baths could argue that, since so many people come to them on saturdays, therefore cleanliness is the highest ambition of man, and during the week no one should stir at all, lest he sweat or soil himself.

in an old french writer, a contemporary of pascal, i came across the following remarkable words: "l'homme est si miserable que l'inconstance avec laquelle il abandonne ses desseins est, en quelque sorte, sa plus grande vertu; parce qu'il temoigne par là qu'il y a encore en lui quelque reste de grandeur qui le porte à se dégouter de choses qui ne méritent pas son amour et son estime." what a long way modern thought has travelled from even the possibility of such an assumption. to consider inconstancy the finest human virtue! surely in order to get somewhere in life it is necessary to give the whole self, one's whole energy to the service of some one particular purpose. in order to be a virtuoso, a master of one's art and one's instrument, it is necessary with a truly angelic or asinine patience to try over and over again, dozens, hundreds, thousands of times, different ways of expressing one's ideas or moods, sparing neither labour, nor time, nor health. everything else must take a second place. the first must be occupied by "the art." goncharov, in his novel obryv, cleverly relates how a 'cellist struggled all day, like a fish against the ice, sawing and sawing away, so that later on, in the evening, he might play super-excellently well. and that is the general idea. objectionable, tedious, irritating labour,—this is the condition of genius, which no doubt explains the reason why men so rarely achieve anything. genius must submit to cultivate an ass within itself—the condition being so humiliating that man will seldom take up the job. the majority prefer talent, that medium which lies between genius and mediocrity. and many a time, towards the end of life, does the genius repent of his choice. "it would be better not to startle the world, but to live at one with it," says ibsen in his last drama. genius is a wretched, blind maniac, whose eccentricities are condoned because of what is got from him. and still we all bow to persevering talent, to the only god in whom we moderns believe, and the eulogy of inconstancy will awake very little sympathy in our hearts. probably we shall not even regard it seriously.

we very often express in a categorical form a judgment of which we do not feel assured, we even lay stress on its absolute validity. we want to see what opposition it will arouse, and this can be achieved only by stating our assumption not as a tentative suggestion, which no one will consider, but as an irrefutable, all-important truth. the greater the value an assumption has for us, the more carefully do we conceal any suggestion of its improbability.

literature deals with the most difficult and important problems of existence, and, therefore, littérateurs consider themselves the most important of people. a bank clerk, who is always handing money out, might just as well consider himself a millionaire. the high estimate placed upon unexplained, unsolved questions ought really to discredit writers in our eyes. and yet these literary men are so clever, so cunning at stating their own case and revealing the high importance of their mission, that in the long run they convince everybody, themselves most of all. this last event is surely owing to their own limited intelligence. the romans augurs had subtler, more versatile minds. in order to deceive others, they had no need to deceive themselves. in their own set they were not afraid to talk about their secrets, even to make fun of them, being fully confident that they could easily vindicate themselves before outsiders, in case of necessity, and pull a solemn face befitting the occasion. but our writers of to-day, before they can lay their improbable assertions before the public, must inevitably try to be convinced in their own minds. otherwise they cannot begin.

"the writer is writing away, the reader is reading away"—the writer doesn't care what the reader is after, the reader doesn't care what the writer is about. such a state of things hurt schedrin very much. he would have liked it different; no sooner has the writer said a word, than the reader at once scales the wall. this was his ideal. but the reader is by no means so naive as all that. he prefers to rest easy, and insists that the writer shall climb the wall for him. so those authors succeed with the public who write "with their heart's blood." conventional tournaments, even the most brilliant, do not attract the masses any more than the connoisseurs. people rush to see a fight of gladiators, where awaits them a scent of real, hot, smoking blood, where they are going to see real, not pretended victims.

thus many writers, like gladiators, shed their blood to gratify that modern caesar, the mob. "salve, caesar, morituri te salutant!"

anton tchekhov tells the truth neither out of love or respect for the truth, nor yet because, in the kantian manner, a high duty bids him never to tell a lie, even to escape death. neither has he the impulse which so often pushes young and fiery souls into rashness; that desire to stand erect, to keep the head high. on the contrary, tchekhov always walks with a stoop, his head bent down, never fixing his eyes on the heavens, since he will read no signs there. if he tells the truth, it is because the most reeking lie no longer intoxicates him, even though he swallow it not in the modest doses that idealism offers, but in immoderate quantities, thousand-gallon-barrel gulps. he would taste the bitterness, but it would not make his head turn, as it does schiller's, or dostoevsky's, or even socrates', whose head, as we know, could stand any quantity of wine, but went spinning with the most commonplace lie.

noblesse oblige.—the moment of obligation, compulsion, duty, that moment described by kant as the essential, almost the only predicate of moral concepts, serves chiefly to indicate that kant was modest in himself and in his attitude towards all whom he addressed, perceiving in all men beings subject to the ennobling effect of morality. noblesse oblige is a motto not for the aristocracy, which recognises in its privileges its own instant duties, but for the self-made, wealthy parvenues who pant for an illustrious title. they have been accustomed to telling lies, to playing poltroon, swindling, and meanness, and the necessity for speaking the truth impartially, for bravely facing danger, for freely giving of their fortunes scares them beyond measure. therefore it is necessary that they should repeat it to themselves and to their children, in whose veins the lying, sneaking blood still runs, hourly, lest they forget: "you must not tell lies, you must be open, magnanimous." it is silly, it is incomprehensible—but "noblesse oblige."

homo homini lupus is one of the most steadfast maxims of eternal morality. in each of our neighbours we fear a wolf. "this fellow is evil-minded, if he is not restrained by law he will ruin us," so we think every time a man gets out of the rut of sanctified tradition.

the fear is just. we are so poor, so weak, so easily ruined and destroyed! how can we help being afraid! and yet, behind danger and menace there is usually hidden something significant, which merits our close and sympathetic attention. but fear's eyes are big. we see danger, danger only, we build up a fabric of morality inside which as in a fortress we sit out of danger all our lives. only poets have undertaken to praise dangerous people—don juans, fausts, tannhaüsers. but nobody takes the poets seriously. common-sense values a commercial-traveller or a don much more highly than a byron, a goethe, or a molière.

the possibilities which open out before mankind are sufficiently limited. it is impossible to see everything, impossible to know everything, impossible to rise too high above the earth, impossible to penetrate too deeply down. what has been is hidden away, what will be we cannot anticipate, and we know for certain that we shall never grow wings. regularity, immutably regular succession of phenomena puts a term to our efforts, drives us into a regular, narrow, hard-beaten road of everyday life. but even on this road we may not wander from side to side. we must watch our feet, consider each step, since the moment we are off our guard disaster is upon us. another life is conceivable, however: life in which the word disaster does not exist, where responsibility for one's actions, even if it be not completely abolished, at least has not such a deadly and accidental weight, and where, on the other hand, there is no "regularity," but rather an infinite number of possibilities. in such a life the sense of fear—most disgraceful to us—disappears. there the virtues are not the same as ours. fearlessness in face of danger, liberality, even lavishness are considered virtues with us, but they are respected without any grounds. socrates was quite right when he argued that not all courage, but only the courage which measures beforehand the risks and the chances of victory, is fully justifiable. to the same extent those economical, careful people who condemn lavishness are in the right. fearlessness and lavishness do not suit mortal men, rather it becomes them to tremble and to count every penny, seeing what a state of poverty and impotence they exist in. that is why these two virtues are so rarely met with, and when they are met, why they arouse such superstitious reverence in the crowd. "this man fears nothing and spares nothing: he is probably not a man, but a demi-god, perhaps even a god." socrates did not believe in gods, so he wanted to justify virtue by reason. kant also did not believe in god, and therefore he derived his morals from "law." but if there is god, and all men are the children of god, then we should be afraid of nothing and spare nothing. and then the man who madly dissipates his own life and fortunes, and the lives and fortunes of others, is more right than the calculating philosophers who vainly seek to regulate mankind on earth.

moral people are the most revengeful of mankind, they employ their morality as the best and most subtle weapon of vengeance. they are not satisfied with simply despising and condemning their neighbour themselves, they want the condemnation to be universal and supreme: that is, that all men should rise as one against the condemned, and that even the offender's own conscience shall be against him. then only are they fully satisfied and reassured. nothing on earth but morality could lead to such wonderful results.

inveterate wickedness.—heretics were often most bitterly persecuted for their least digression from accepted belief. it was just their obstinacy in trifles that irritated the righteous to madness. "why can they not yield on so trifling a matter? they cannot possibly have serious cause for opposition. they only want to grieve us, to spite us." so the hatred mounted up, piles of faggots and torture machines appeared against obdurate wickedness.

i do not know where i came across the remark, whether in tolstoy or turgenev, that those who have been subjected to trial in the courts of justice always acquire a particularly noble expression of face. although logic does so earnestly recommend caution in the forming of contradictory conclusions, come what may i shall for once risk a deduction: a noble expression of face is a sign that a man has been under trial—but certainly not a trial for political crime—for theft or bribe-taking.

the most important and significant revelations come into the world naked, without a wordy garment. to find words for them is a delicate, difficult business, a whole art. stupidities and banalities, on the contrary, appear at once in ready-made apparel, gaudy even if shabby. so that they are ready straight away to be presented to the public.

a strange impatience has taken possession of russian writers lately. they are all running a race after the "ultimate words." they have no doubt that the ultimate words will be attained. the question is, who will lay hold of them first.

the appearance of socrates on the philosophic horizon is hailed by historians as the greatest event. morals were beginning to work loose, athens was threatened with ruin. socrates' mission was to put an end to the violent oscillation in moral judgments which extreme individualism on the one hand and the relativism of the sophists on the other had set up. the great teacher did all he could. he gave up his usual occupations and his family life, he took no thought for the morrow, he taught, taught, taught—simple people or eminent, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned. notwithstanding, he did not save the country. under pericles, athens flourished without wisdom, or at least independently of socratic wisdom. after pericles, in spite of the fact that the socratic teaching found such a genius as plato to continue it, athens steadily declined, and aristotle is already master to the son of philip of macedon. whence it is obvious that the wisdom of socrates had not saved the country, and as this had been its chief object, it had failed in its object, and therefore was not worthy of the exaggerated respect it received. it is necessary to find some justification for philosophy other than country-saving. this would be the easiest thing in the world. but altogether we must give up the favourite device of the philosophers, of looking to find in the well-being of society the raison d'être of philosophy. at the best, the trick was a risky one. as a rule, wisdom goes one way, society the other. they are artificially connected. it is public orators who have trained both the philosophers and the masses to regard as worthy of attention only those considerations which have absolutely everything on their side: social utility, morality, even metaphysical wisdom.... why so much? is it not sufficient if some new project will prove useful? why try to get the sanction of morality and metaphysics? nay, once the laws of morality are autonomous, and once ideas are allowed to stand above the empirical needs of mankind, it is impossible to balance ideas and morality with social requirements, or even with the salvation of the country from ruin. pereat mundus, fiat philosophia. if athens was ruined because of philosophy, philosophy is not impugned. so the autonomous thinker should hold. but de facto a thinker does not like quarrelling with his country.

when a writer has to express an idea whose foundation he has not been able to establish, and which yet is dear to his heart, so that he earnestly wishes to secure its general acceptance, as a rule he interrupts his exposition, as if to take breath, and makes a small, or at times a serious digression, during which he proves the invalidity of this or that proposition, often without any reference to his real theme. having triumphantly exposed one or more absurdities, and thus acquired the aplomb of a solid expert, he returns to his proper task, calculating that now he will inspire his reader with greater confidence. his calculation is perfectly justified. the reader is afraid to attack such a skilled dialectician, and prefers to agree rather than to risk himself in argument. not even the greatest intellects, particularly in philosophy, disdain such stratagems. the idealists, for example, before expounding their theories, turn and rend materialism. the materialists, we remember, at one time did the same with the idealists, and achieved a vast success.

theories of sequence and consequence are binding only upon the disciples, not upon the masters. fathers of great ideas tend to be very, careless about their progeny, giving very little heed to their future career. the offspring of one and the same philosopher frequently bear such small resemblance to one another, that it is impossible to discern the family connection. conscientious disciples, wasting away under the arduous effort to discover that which does not exist, are brought to despair of their task. having got an inkling of the truth concerning their difficulty, they give up the job for ever, they cease their attempt at reconciling glaring contradictions. but then they only insist the harder upon the necessity for studying the philosophers, studying them minutely, circumstantially, historically, philologically even. so the history of philosophy is born, which now is taking the place of philosophy. certainly the history of philosophy may be an exact science, since by means of historical research it is often possible to decide what exactly a certain philosopher did mean, and in what sense he employed his peculiar terms. and seeing that there have been a fair number of philosophers, the business of clearing them all up is a respectable undertaking, and deserves the name of a science. for a good translation or a commentary on the chief works of kant a man may be given the degree of doctor of philosophy, and henceforth recognised as one who is initiated in the profundities of the secrets of the universe. then why ever should anybody think out new systems—or even write them?

the raptures of creative activity!—empty words, invented by men who never had an opportunity of judging from their own experience, but who derive their conclusion syllogistically: "if a creation gives us such delight, what must the creator himself experience!" usually the creator feels only vexations. every creation is created out of the void. at the best, the maker finds himself confronted with a formless, meaningless, usually obstinate and stiff matter, which yields reluctantly to form. and he does not know how to begin. every time a new thought is gendered, so often must that new thought, which for the moment seems so brilliant and fascinating, be thrown aside as worthless. creative activity is a continual progression from failure to failure, and the condition of the creator is usually one of uncertainty, mistrust, and shattered nerves. the more serious and original the task which a man sets himself, the more tormenting is the self-misgiving. for this reason even men of genius cannot keep up the creative activity to the last. as soon as they have acquired their technique, they begin to repeat themselves, well aware that the public willingly endures the monotony of a favourite, even finds virtue in it. every connoisseur of art is satisfied if he recognises in a new work the accepted "manner" of the artist. few realise that the acquiring of a manner is the beginning of the end. artists realise well enough, and would be glad to be rid of their manner, which seems to them a hackneyed affair. but this requires too great a strain on their powers, new torments, doubts, new groping. he who has once been through the creative raptures is not easily tempted to try again. he prefers to turn out work according to the pattern he has evolved, calmly and securely, assured of his results. fortunately no one except himself knows that he is not any longer a creator. what a lot of secrets there are in the world, and how easy it is to keep one's secret safe from indiscreet glances!

a writer works himself up to a pitch of ecstasy, otherwise he does not take up his pen. but ecstasy is not so easily distinguished from other kinds of excitement. and as a writer is always in haste to write, he has rarely the patience to wait, but at the first promptings of animation begins to pour himself forth. so in the name of ecstasy we are offered such quantities of banal, by no means ecstatic effusions. particularly easy it is to confound with ecstasy that very common sort of spring-time liveliness which in our language is well-named calf-rapture. and calf-rapture is much more acceptable to the public than true inspiration or genuine transport. it is easier, more familiar.

a school axiom: logical scepticism refutes itself, since the denial of the possibility of positive knowledge is already an affirmation. but, in the first place, scepticism is not bound to be logical, for it has no desire whatever to gratify that dogma which raises logic to the position of law. secondly, where is the philosophic theory which, if carried to its extreme, would not destroy itself? therefore, why is more demanded from scepticism than from other systems? especially from scepticism, which honestly avows that it cannot give that which all other theories claim to give.

the aristotelian logic, which forms the chief component in modern logic, arose, as we know, as a result of the permanent controversies which were such sport to the greeks. in order to argue, it is indeed necessary to have a common ground; in other words, to agree about the rules of the game. but in our day dialectic tournaments, like all other bouts of contention, no longer attract people. thus logic may be relegated to the background.

in gogol's portrait, the artist despairs at the thought that he has sacrificed art for the sake of "life." in ibsen's drama, when we dead awaken, there is also an artist, who has become world-famous, and who repents that he has sacrificed his life—to art. now, choose—which of the two ways of repentance do you prefer?

man is often quite indifferent to success whilst he has it. but once he loses his power over people, he begins to fret. and—vice versa.

turgenev's insarov strikes the imagination of elena because he is a man preparing for battle. she prefers him to shubin the painter, or to berseniev the savant. since ancient days women have looked with favour on warriors rather than on peaceful men. had turgenev invested that idea with less glamour, he would probably not have become the ideal of the young. who does not get a thrill from elena and her elect? who has not felt the fascination of turgenev's women! and yet all of them give themselves to the strong male. with such "superior people," as with beasts, the males fight with each other, the woman looks on, and when it is over, she submits herself the slave of the conqueror.

a caterpillar is transformed into a chrysalis, and for a long time lives in a warm, quiet little world. perhaps if it had human consciousness it would declare that that world was the best, perhaps the only one possible to live in. but there comes a time when some unknown influence causes the little creature to begin the work of destruction. if other caterpillars could see it how horrified they would be, revolted to the bottom of their soul by the awful work in which the insurgent is engaged. they would call it immoral, godless, they would begin to talk about pessimism, scepticism, and so on. to destroy what has cost such labour to construct! why, what is wrong with this complete, cosy, comfortable little world? to keep it intact they call to their aid sacred morality and the idealistic theory of knowledge. nobody cares that the caterpillar has grown wings, that when it has nibbled its old nest away it will fly out into space—nobody gives a thought to this.

wings—that is mysticism; self-nibbling—this is actuality. those who are engaged in such actuality deserve torture and execution. and there are plenty of prisons and voluntary hangmen on the bright earth. the majority of books are prisons, and great authors are not bad hangmen.

nietzsche and dostoevsky seem to be typical "inverted simulators," if one may use the expression. they imitated spiritual sanity, although they were spiritually insane. they knew their morbidity well enough, but they exhibited their disease only to that extent where freakishness passes for originality. with the sensitiveness peculiar to all who are in constant danger, they never went beyond the limits. the axe of the guillotine of public opinion hung over them: one awkward move, and the execution automatically takes place. but they knew how to avoid unwarrantable moves.

the so-called ultimate questions troubled mankind in the world's dawn as badly as they trouble us now. adam and eve wanted "to know," and they plucked the fruit at their risk. cain, whose sacrifice did not please god, raised his hand against his brother: and it seemed to him he committed murder in the name of justice, in vindication of his own injured rights. nobody has ever been able to understand why god preferred abel's sacrifice to that of cain. in our own day sallieri repeats cain's vengeance and poisons his friend and benefactor mozzart, according to the poem of poushkin. "all say, there is no justice on earth; but there is no justice up above: this is as clear to me as a simple scale of music." no man on earth can fail to recognise in these words his own tormenting doubts. the outcome is creative tragedy, which for some mysterious reason has been considered up till now as the highest form of human creation. everything is being unriddled and explained. if we compare our knowledge with that of the ancients, we appear very wise. but we are no nearer to solving the riddle of eternal justice than cain was. progress, civilisation, all the conquests of the human mind have brought us nothing new here. like our ancestors, we stand still with fright and perplexity before ugliness, disease, misery, senility, death. all that the wise men have been able to do so far is to turn the earthly horrors into problems. we are told that perhaps all that is horrible only appears horrible, that perhaps at the end of the long journey something new awaits us. perhaps! but the modern educated man, with the wisdom of all the centuries of mankind at his command, knows no more about it than the old singer who solved universal problems at his own risk. we, the children of a moribund civilisation, we, old men from our birth, in this respect are as young as the first man.

they say it is impossible to set a bound between the "i" and society. na?veté! crusoes are to be found not only on desert islands. they are there, in populous cities. it is true they are not clad in skins, they have no dark fridays in attendance, and so nobody recognises them. but surely friday and a fur jacket do not make a crusoe. loneliness, desertion, a boundless, shoreless sea, on which no sail has risen for tens of years,—do not many of our contemporaries live in such a circumstance? and are they not crusoes, to whom the rest of people have become a vague reminiscence, barely distinguishable from a dream?

to be irremediably unhappy—this is shameful. an irremediably unhappy person is outside the laws of the earth. any connection between him and society is severed finally. and since, sooner or later, every individual is doomed to irremediable unhappiness, the last word, of philosophy is loneliness.

"it is better to be an unhappy man, than a happy pig." the utilitarians hoped by this golden bridge to get over the chasm which separates them from the promised land of the ideal. but psychology stepped in and rudely interrupted: there are no unhappy people, the unhappy ones are all pigs. dostoevsky's philosopher of the underworld, raskolnikov, also hamlet, and such-like, are not simply unhappy men whose fate might be esteemed, or even preferred before some happy fates; they are simply unhappy swine. and they themselves are principally aware of it.... he that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

if you want people to envy you your sorrow or your shame, look as if you were proud of it. if you have only enough of the actor in you, rest assured, you will become the hero of the day. since the parable of the pharisee and the publican was uttered, what a lot of people who could not fulfil their sacred duties pretended to be publicans and sinners, and so aroused sympathy, even envy.

philosophers dearly love to call their utterances "truths," since in that guise they become binding upon us all. but each philosopher invents his own truths. which means that he asks his pupils to deceive themselves in the way he shows, but that he reserves for himself the option of deceiving himself in his own way. why? why not allow everyone to deceive himself just as he likes?

when xanthippe poured slops over socrates, as he returned from his philosophical occupations, tradition says that he observed: "after a storm there is always rain." would it not be more worthy (not of the philosopher, but of philosophy) to say: after one's philosophical exercise, one feels as if one had had slops emptied over one's head. and therefore xanthippe did but give outward expression to what had taken place in socrates' soul. symbols are not always beautiful.

from the notes of an underworld man—"i read little, i write little, and, it seems to me, i think little. he who is ill-disposed towards me will say that this shows a great defect in my character, perhaps he will call me lazy, an oblomov, and will repeat the copy-book maxim that idleness is the mother of all the vices. a friend, on the other hand, will say it is only a temporary state, that perhaps i am not quite well—in short, he will find random excuses for me, more with the idea of consoling me than of speaking the truth. but for my part, i say let us wait. if it turns out at the end of my life that i have 'done' not less than others—why, then—it will mean that idleness may be a virtue."

b?rne, a contemporary of heine, was very much offended when his enemies insisted on explaining his misanthropic outpourings as the result of a stomach and liver disease. it seemed to him much nobler and loftier to be indignant and angry because of the triumph of evil on earth, than because of the disorders of his own physical organs. sentimentality apart—was he right, and is it really nobler?

a real writer disdains to repeat from hearsay events which he has not witnessed. it seems to him tedious and humiliating to tell "in his own words," like a schoolboy, things which he has fished out of another man's books. but there—how can we expect him to stoop to such insignificance!

whilst conscience stands between the educated and the lower classes, as the only possible mediator, there can be no hope for mutual understanding. conscience demands sacrifices, nothing but sacrifices. it says to the educated man: "you are happy, well-off, learned—the people are poor, unhappy, ignorant; renounce therefore your well-being, or else soothe your conscience with suave speeches." only he who has nothing to sacrifice, nothing to lose, having lost everything, can hope to approach the people as an equal.

this is why dostoevsky and nietzsche were not afraid to speak in their own name, and did not feel compelled either to stretch up or to stoop down in order to be on a level with men.

not to know what you want is considered a shameful weakness. to confess it is to lose for ever not only the reputation of a writer, but even of a man. none the less, "conscience" demands such a confession. true, in this case as in most others the demands of conscience are satisfied only when they incur no very dire consequences. leaving aside the fact that people are no longer terrified of the once-so-terrible public opinion (the public has been tamed, it listens with reverence to what is told to it, and never dares judge)—the admission "i do not know myself what i want" seems to offer a guarantee of something important. those who know what they want generally want trifles, and attain to inglorious ends: riches, fame, or at the best, progress or a philosophy of their own. even now it is sometimes not a sin to laugh at such wonders, and may-be the time is coming when a rehabilitated hamlet will announce, not with shame but with pride: "i don't in the least know what i want." and the crowd will applaud him, for the crowd always applauds heroes and proud men.

fear of death is explained conclusively by the desire for self-preservation. but at that rate the fear should disappear in old and sick people, who ought by nature to look with indifference on death. whereas the horror of death is present in all living things. does not this suggest that there is still some other reason for the dread, and that even where the pangs of horror cannot save a man from his end, still it is a necessary and purposeful anguish? the natural-scientific explanation here, as usual, stops halfway, and fails to lead the human mind to the promised goal.

moral indignation is only a refined form of ancient vengeance. once anger spoke with daggers, now words will do. and happy is the man who, loving and thirsting to chastise his offender, yet is appeased when the offence is punished. on account of the gratification it offers to the passions, morality, which has replaced bloody chastisement, will not easily' lose its charm. but there are offences, deep, unforgettable offences, inflicted not by people, but by "laws of nature." how are we to settle these? here neither dagger nor indignant word will serve. therefore, for him who has once run foul of the laws of nature morality sinks, for ever or for a time, into subsidiary importance.

fatalism frightens people particularly in that form which holds it just to say, of anything that happens, or has happened, or will happen: be it so! how can one acquiesce in the actuality of life, when it contains so many horrors? but amor fati does not imply eternal acquiescence in actuality. it is only a truce, for a more or less lasting period. time is needed in which to estimate the forces and intentions of the enemy. under the mask of friendship the old enmity persists, and an awful revenge is in preparation.

in the "ultimate questions of life" we are not a bit nearer the truth than our ancestors were. everybody knows it, and yet so many go on talking about infinity, without any hope of ever saying anything. it is evident that a result—in the usual acceptance of the word—is not necessary. in the very last resort we trust to instinct, even in the field of philosophy, where reason is supposed to reign supreme, uttering its eternal "why?" "why?" laughs at all possible "becauses." instinct, however, does not mock. it simply ignores the whys, and leads us by impossible ways to ends that our divine reason would hold absurd, if it could only see them in time. but reason is a laggard, without much foresight, and, therefore, when we have run up to an unexpected conclusion, nothing remains but for reason to accept: or even to justify, to exalt the new event. and therefore,—"reality is reasonable," say the philosophers: reasonable, not only when they draw their philosophic salaries, as the socialists, and with them our philosopher vladimir soloviov, explain; but still reasonable even when philosophers have their maintenance taken away from them. nay, in the latter case, particularly in the latter case, in spite of the socialists and vi. soloviov, reality shows herself most reasonable. a philosopher persecuted, downtrodden, hungry, cold, receiving no salary, is nearly always an extreme fatalist—although this, of course, by no means hinders him from abusing the existing order. theories of sequence and consequence, as we already know, are binding only upon disciples, whose single virtue lies in their scrupulous, logical developing of the master's idea. but masters themselves invent ideas, and, therefore, have the right to substitute one for another. the sovereign power which proclaims a law has the same power to abolish it. but the duty of the subordinate consists in the praise, in the consequential interpretation and the strict observance of the dictates of the higher will.

the pharisee in the parable fulfilled all that religion demanded of him: kept his fasts, paid his tithes, etc. had he a right to be pleased with his own piety, and to despise the erring publican? everybody thought so, including the pharisee himself. the judgment of christ came as the greatest surprise to him. he had a clear conscience. he did not merely pretend before others to be righteous, he himself believed in his own righteousness. and suddenly he turns out guilty, awfully guilty. but if the conscience of a righteous man does not help him to distinguish between good and evil, how is he to avoid sin? what does kant's moral law mean, that law which was as consoling as the starry sky? kant lived his life in profound peace of soul, he met his death quietly, in the consciousness of his own purity. but if christ came again, he might condemn the serene philosopher for his very serenity. for the pharisee, we repeat, was righteous, if purity of intentions, together with a firm readiness to fulfil everything which appears, to him in the light of duty, be righteousness in a man.

we jeer and laugh at a man not because he is ridiculous, but because we want to have a laugh out of him. in the same way we are indignant, not because this or the other act is revolting to us, but because we want to let off our steam. but it does not follow from this that we ought always to be calm and smooth. woe to him who would try to realise the ideal of justice on earth.

we think with peculiar intensity during the hard moments of our life—we write when we have nothing else to do. so that a writer can only communicate something of importance in reproducing the past. when we are driven to think, we have unfortunately no mind to write, which accounts for the fact that books are never more than a feeble echo of what a man has gone through.

tchekhov has a story called misfortune which well illustrates the difficulty a man finds in adapting himself to a new truth, if this truth threaten the security of his condition. the merchant avdeyer does not believe that he is condemned, that he has been brought to trial, and tried, and found guilty, for his irregularities in a public bank. he still thinks the verdict is yet to come—he still waits. in the world of learning something like this is happening. the educated have become so accustomed to think themselves not guilty, perfectly in the right, that they do not admit for a moment even now that they are brought to court. when threatening voices reach them, calling them to give an account of themselves, they only suspiciously shrug their shoulders. "all this will pass away"—they think. well, when at last they are convinced that misfortune has befallen them, they will probably begin to justify themselves, like avdeyer, declaring that they cannot even read printed matter sufficiently well. as yet, they pass for respectable, wise, experienced, omniscient men.

if a man had come to dostoevsky and said to him, "i am hopelessly unhappy," the great artist in human misery would probably, at the bottom of his soul, have laughed at the na?veté of the poor creature. may one confess such things of oneself? may one go to such lengths of complaint, and still expect consolation from his neighbour?

hopelessness is the most solemn and supreme moment in life. till that point we have been assisted—now we are left to ourselves. previously we had to do with men and human laws—now with eternity, and with the complete absence of laws. is it not obvious?

byelinsky, in his famous letter, accuses gogol, among other things, that in his correspondence with friends, he, gogol, succumbs to the fear of death, of devils, and of hell. i find the accusation just: gogol definitely feared death, demons, and hell. the point is, whether it is not right to fear these things, and whether fearlessness would be a proof of the high development of a man's soul. schopenhauer asserts that death inspired philosophy. all the best poetry, all the wonderful mythology of the ancients and of modern peoples have for their source the fear of death. only modern science forbids men to fear, and insists on a tranquil attitude towards death. so we arrive at utilitarianism and the positivist philosophy. if you wish to be rid of both these creeds you must be allowed to think again of death, and without shame to fear hell and its devils. it may be there is really a certain justification for concealing fears of such kind: in the ability to conceal one's agitation at moments of great danger there is a true beauty. but to deaden human sensitiveness and to keep the human intelligence within the bounds of perception, such a task can have charms only for a petty creature. happily, mankind has no means by which to perform on itself such monstrous castration. persecuted eros, it is true, has hidden himself from the eyes of his enemies, but he has never abjured himself; and even the strictest medieval monks could not completely tear out their hearts from their breasts. similarly with the aspiration towards the infinite: science persecuted it and put a veto on it. but laboratory workers themselves, sooner or later, recover their senses, and thirstily long to get out of the enclosure of positive knowledge, with that same thirsty longing that tortured the monks who wanted to get out of the enclosure of monastery walls.

if fate—and they say there is such a law—punishes criminals, it has its penalty also for the lovers of good. the former it throttles, the latter it spits upon. the former end in bitter torment, the latter—in ignominy.

philosophy has always loved to occupy the position of a servant. in the middle ages she was the ancilla theologi?, nowadays she waits on science. at the same time she calls herself the science of sciences.

i wonder which more effectually makes a man rush forwards without looking back: the knowledge that behind him hovers the head of medusa, with horrible snakes, ready to turn him into stone; or the certainty that in the rear lies the unchangeable order laid down by the law of causality and by modern science. judging from what we see, judging from the degree of tension which human thought has reached to-day, it would seem that the head of medusa is less terrible than the law of causality. in order to escape the latter, man will face anything. rather than return to the bosom of scientific cause and effect, he embraces madness: not that fine frenzy of madness which spends itself in fiery speeches, but technical madness, for which one is stowed away in a lunatic asylum.

"to experience a feeling of joy or sorrow, of triumph or despair, ennui or happiness, and so on, without having sufficient cause for such feeling, is an unfailing sign of mental disease...." one of the modern truths which is seeing its last days.

count tolstoy's german biographer regrets the constant misunderstanding and quarrels which took place between tolstoy and turgenev. he reminds us of goethe and schiller, and thinks that russian literature would have gained a great deal if the two remarkable russian writers had been more pacific, had remained on constantly friendly terms with one another, and bequeathed to posterity a couple of volumes of letters dealing with literary and philosophic subjects. it might have been very nice—but i refuse to imagine tolstoy and turgenev keeping up a long, peaceful correspondence, particularly on high subjects. nearly every one of turgenev's opinions drove tolstoy to madness, or was capable of so driving him. dostoevsky's dislike of turgenev was even stronger than tolstoy's; he wrote of him very spitefully and offensively, libelling him rather than drawing a caricature. evidently dostoevsky, like tolstoy, detested the "european" in their confrere. but here he was mistaken, in spite of his psychological acuteness. to dostoevsky, it was enough that turgenev wore european clothes and tried to appear like a westerner. he himself did the opposite: he tried to get rid of every trace of europeanism from himself, apparently without great success, since he failed to make clear to himself wherein lay the strength of europe, and where her sting. nevertheless, the late mikhailovsky is not wrong in calling dostoevsky a seeker of buried treasure. surely, in the second half of his literary activity dostoevsky no longer sought for the real fruits of life. there awoke in him the russian, the elemental man, with a thirst for the miraculous. compared with what he wanted, the fruits of european civilisation seemed to him trivial, flat, insipid. the age-long civilisation of his neighbours told him that there never had been a miracle, and never would be. but all his being, not yet broken-in by civilisation, craved for the stupendous unknown. therefore, the apparently-satisfied progressivist enraged him. tolstoy once said of turgenev: "i hate his democratic backside." dostoevsky might have repeated these words.... and now, for the gratification of the german critic, please reconcile the russian writers and make them talk serenely on high-flown matters! dostoevsky was within a hair's-breath of a quarrel with tolstoy, with whom, not long before death interrupted him, he began a long controversy concerning "anna karenina." even tolstoy seemed to him too compliant, too accommodating.

we rarely make a display of that which is dear to us, near and dear and necessary. on the other hand, we readily exhibit that which is of no importance to us—there is nothing else to be done with it. a man takes his mistress to the theatre and sticks her in full view of everybody; he prefers to remain at home with the woman he loves, or to go about with her quietly, unnoticed. so with our "virtues." every time we notice in ourselves some quality we do not prize we haste to make a show of it, thinking perhaps that someone would be glad of it. if it wins us approval, we are pleased—so there is some gain. to an actor, a writer, or an orator, his own antics, without which he can have no success with the public, are often disgusting. and yet his knack of making-such antics he considers a talent, a divine gift, and he would rather die than that it should be lost to the public. talent, on the whole, is accounted a divine gift, only because it is always on show, because it serves the public in some way or other. all our judgments are permeated through and through with utilitarianism, and were we to attempt to purify them from this adulteration what would remain of modern philosophy? that is why youngish, inexperienced writers usually believe in harmonia praestabilitata, even though they have never heard of leibnitz. they persuade themselves that there is no breach between egoistic and idealistic aspirations; that, for instance, thirst for fame and desire to serve mankind are one and the same thing. such a persuasion is usually very tenacious of life, and lasts long in men of vigorous and courageous mind. it seems to me that poushkin would not have lost it, even had he lived to a prolonged old age. it was also part of turgenev's belief—if a man of his spiritual fibre could have any belief. tolstoy now believed, and now disbelieved, according to the work he had in hand. when he had other people's ideas to destroy he doubted the identity of egoistic and idealist aspirations; when he had his own to defend, he believed in it. which is a line of conduct worthy of attention, and supremely worthy of imitation; for human truths are proper exclusively for ancillary purposes....

man is such a conservative creature that any change, even a change for the better, scares him, he prefers the bad old way to the new good one. a man who has been all his life a confirmed materialist would not consent to believe that the soul was immortal, not if it were proved to him more geometrico, and not if he were a constitutional coward, fearing death like shakespeare's falstaff. then we must take human conceit into account. men do not like to admit themselves wrong. it is absurd, but it is so. men, trivial, wretched creatures, proved by history and by every common event to be bunglers, yet must needs consider themselves infallible, omniscient. what for? why not admit their ignorance flatly and frankly? true, it is easier said than done. but why should slavish intellect, in spite of our desire to be straightforward, deck us out with would-be truths, of which we cannot divest ourselves even when we know their flimsiness. socrates wanted to think that he knew nothing—but he could not bring it off. he most absorbedly believed in his own knowledge; nothing could be "truth," except his teaching; he accepted the decree of the oracle, and sincerely esteemed himself the wisest of men. and so it will be, as long as philosophers feel it their duty to teach and to save their neighbours. if a man wants to help people, he is bound to become a liar. we should undertake doubt seriously, not in order to return at length to established beliefs, for that would be a vicious circle. experience shows us that such a process, certainly in the development of ultimate questions, only leads from error to error; we should doubt so that doubt becomes a continuous creative force, inspiring the very essence of our life. for established knowledge argues in us a condition of imperfect receptivity. the weak, flabby spirit cannot bear quick, ceaseless change. it must look round, it must have time to gather its wits, and so it must undergo the same experience time after time. it needs the support and the security of habit, but the well-grown soul despises your crutches. he is tired of crawling on his own cabbage patch, he tears himself away from his own "native" soil, and takes himself off into the far distances, braving the infinitude of space. surely everybody knows we are not to live in the world for ever. but cowardice prevents one straightforward admitting of it, we keep it close till there is an occasion to air it as a truism. only when misfortune, disease, old age come upon us, then the dread fear of departure walks with us like our own skeleton. we cannot dismiss him. at length, involuntarily, we begin to examine our gruesome companion with curiosity. and then, strangely enough, we observe that he not only tortures us, but, keeping pace with us, he has begun to gnaw through all the threads that bind us to the old existence. at moments it seems as if, a few more threads gone, nothing, nothing will remain to hold us back, the eternal dream of crawling man will be fulfilled, we shall be released from the bonds, we shall betake ourselves in liberty to regions far from this damned vale of earth....

moralists are abused because they offer us "moral consolations." this is not quite fair. moralists would joyfully substitute palpable blessings for their abstract gifts, if they could. when he was young, tolstoy wanted to make men happy; when he was old, and knew he could not make them happy, he began to preach renunciation, resignation, and so forth. and how angry he got when people wouldn't have his teaching! but if, instead of foisting his doctrines off on us as the solution of the ultimate problems, and as optimism, he had only spoken of the impossibility of finding satisfactory answers, and have offered himself as a pessimist, he would probably have obtained a much more willing hearing. now he is annoying, because, finding himself unable to relieve his neighbours, he turns to them and insists that they shall consider themselves relieved by him, nay, even made happy by him. to which many will not agree: for why should they voluntarily renounce their rights? since although, god knows, the right of quarrelling with one's fate, and cursing it, is not a very grand right, still, it is a right ...

ivanov, in tchekhov's drama of that name, compares himself to an overstrained labourer. the labourer dies, so that all that remains to ivanov is to die. but logic, as you know, recommends great caution in coming to conclusions by analogy. behold tchekhov himself, who, as far as we can judge, had endured in his own soul all the tragedy, just as ivanov had, did not die or think of dying, or even turn out a wasted man. he is doing something, he struggles, he seeks, his work seems important and considerable to us, just like other human works. ivanov shot himself because the drama must end, while tchekhov had not yet finished his own struggle. our aesthetics demand that the drama must have a climax and a finale: though we have abandoned the aristotelian unities. given a little more time, however, dramatic writers will have got rid of this restriction also. they will frankly confess that they do not know how, or with what event to end their dramas. stories have already learnt to dispense with an ending.

more of the same.—ivanov says: "now, where is my salvation? in what? if an intelligent, educated, healthy man for no discoverable reason sets up a lazarus lament and starts to roll down an inclined plane, then he is rolling without resisting, and there is no salvation for him." one way out would be to accept the inclined plane and the gathering impetus as normal. even further, one might find in the rolling descent a proof of one's spiritual superiority to other men. of course in such a case one should go apart from the rest, not court young girls or fraternise with those who are living the ordinary life, but be alone. "love is nonsense, caresses maudlin, work is meaningless, and song and fiery speeches are banal, played-out," continued ivanov. to young sasha these words are horrible,—but ivanov will be responsible for them. he is already responsible for them. that he is tottering is nothing: it is still full early for him to shoot himself. he will live whilst his creator, tchekhov, lives. and we shall listen to the shaky, vacillating philosophy. we are so sick of symmetry and harmony and finality, sick as we are of bourgeois self-complacency.

it will be seen from the above that already in ivanov, one of his early works, tchekhov has assumed the r?le of advocatus diaboli. wherever ivanov appears he brings ruin and destruction. it is true, tchekhov hesitates to take his side openly, and evidently does not know what to do with his hero, so that in the end he shakes him off, so to speak, he washes his hands of him in the accepted fashion: ivanov shoots himself in the sight of everybody, has not even time to go discreetly into a corner. the only justification of ivanov is that caricature of honesty, doctor lvov. lvov is not a living figure—that is obvious. but this is why he is remarkable. it is remarkable that tchekhov should deem it necessary to resurrect the forgotten starodoum, that utterer of truisms in fon-visin's comedy; and to resurrect him no longer that people may bow their heads before the incarnation of virtue, but so that they shall jeer at him. look at doctor lvov! is he not starodoum alive again? he is honesty personified. from force of old habit, honesty sticks his chest out, and speaks in a loud voice, with imperious tone, and yet not one of this old loyal subjects gives a brass farthing for him. they don't even trouble to gibe at him, but spit on him and shove him through the door, as a disgusting and impudent toady. poor honesty! what has he sunk to! evidently virtues, like everything else, should not live too long on earth.

tchekhov's "uncle vanya" is waiting to throw himself on the neck of his friend and rival, the doctor, throw himself on his neck and sob there like a little child, but he finds that the doctor himself has an unquenchable thirst for consolation and encouragement, whilst poor sonia can bear her maiden sorrows no longer. they all go wandering round with big, lost eyes, looking for someone to relieve them from part of their woes, at least. and lo, everybody is in the same street as themselves. all are over-heavy-laden, not one can carry his own burden, let alone give a lift to another's. the last consolation is taken away. it is no use complaining: there is no sympathetic response. on all faces the same expression of hopelessness and despair. each must bear his cross in silence. none may weep nor utter pitiful cries—it would be uncalled-for and indecent. when uncle vanya, who has not realised at once the extremity of his situation, begins to cry out: "my life's a waste!" nobody wants to listen to him. "waste, waste! everybody knows it's a waste! shut your mouth, howling won't help you: neither will pistol-shots solve anything. everyone of us might start your cry—but we don't, neither do we shout:

—you think i'll weep;

no, i'll not weep: i have full cause of weeping,

but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,

or ere i'll weep; o fool, i shall go mad."

gradually there settles down a dreadful, eternal silence of the cemetery. all go mad, without words, they realise what is happening within them, and make up their minds for the last shift: to hide their grief for ever from men, and to speak in commonplace, trivial words which will be accepted as sensible, serious, and even lofty expressions. no longer will anyone cry: "life is a waste," and intrude his feelings on his neighbours. everybody knows that it is shameful for one's life to be a waste, and that this shame should be hidden from every eye. the last law on earth is—loneliness.

résigne-toi, mon c?ur, dors ton sommeil de brute!

groundless assumptions.—"based on nothing," because they seem to derive from common assumption of the reasonableness of human existence, which assumption surely is the child of our desires, and probably a bastard at that..... in his miserly knight poushkin represented a miser as a romantic figure. gogol, with his plyushkin, creates on the contrary a repulsive figure of a miser. gogol was nearer to reality. a miser is ugly, whatever view you take of him—inward or outward. yet gogol ought not to teach people to preserve in their age the ideals of their youth. once old age is upon us—it must not be improved upon, much less apologised for. it must be accepted, and its essence brought to light. plyushkin, the vulgar, dirty maniac is disgusting—but who knows? perhaps he is fulfilling the serious mission of his own being. he is possessed by one desire—to everything else, to all happenings in the outer world he is indifferent. it is the same to him whether he is hungry or full, warm or cold, clean or dirty. practically no event can distract his attention from his single purpose. he is disinterestedly mean, if one may say so. he has no need for his riches. he lets them rot in a disgusting heap, and does not dream, like poushkin's knight, of palaces and power, or of sportive nymphs. upon what end is he concentrated? no one has the time to think it out. at the sight of plyushkin everyone recalls the damage the miser has done. everyone of course is right: plyushkins, who heap up fortunes to let them rot, are very harmful. the social judgment is nearly always to the point. but not quite always. it won't hurt morals and social considerations if at times they have to hold their tongue—and at such times we might succeed in guessing the riddle of meanness, sordidness, old age.

we have sufficient grounds for taking life mistrustfully: it has defrauded us so often of our cherished expectations. but we have still stronger grounds for mistrusting reason: since if life deceived us, it was only because futile reason let herself be deceived. perhaps reason herself invented the deception, and then to serve her own ambitious ends, threw the blame on life, so that life shall appear sick-headed. but if we have to choose between life and reason, we choose life, and then we no longer need try to foresee and to explain, we can wait, and accept all that is unalterable as part of the game. and thus nietzsche, having realised that all his hopes had gradually crumbled, and that he could never get back to his former strength, but must grow worse and worse every day, wrote in a private letter of may 28, 1883: "ich will es so schwer haben, wie nur irgend ein mensch es hat; erst writer diesem drucke gewinne ich das gute gewissen dafür, etwas zu besitzen, das wenige menschen haben und gehabt haben: flügel, um im gleichnisse zu reden." in these few simple words lies the key to the philosophy of nietzsche.

"so long as apollo calls him not to the sacred offering, of all the trifling children of men the most trifling perhaps is the poet." put poushkin's expression into plain language, and you will get a page on neuropathology. all neurasthenic individuals sink from a state of extreme excitation to one of complete prostration. poets too: and they are proud of it.

shy people usually receive their impressions post-dated. during those moments when an event is taking place before their eyes, they can see nothing, only later on, having evoked from their memory a fragment of what happened, they make for themselves an impression of the whole scene. and then, retrospectively arise in their soul feelings of pity, offence, surprise, so vivid, as if they were the flames of the instant moment, not rekindlings from the past. thus shy people always think a great deal, and are always too late for their work. it is never too late for thought. timid before others, they reach great heights of daring when alone. they are bad speakers—but often excellent writers. their life is insignificant and tedious, they are not noticed,—until they become famous. and by the time fame comes, they do not need popular attention any more.

if tchekhov's layevsky, in the duel, had been a writer with a literary talent, people would have said of him that he was original, and that he was engaged in the study of the "mysticism of sex," like gabriele d'annunzio for example; whereas, as he stands, he is only banal. his idleness is a reproach to him: people would prefer that at least he should copy out extracts from documents.

from observations on children.—egoism in a man strikes us unpleasantly because it betrays our poverty. "i cannot dole out my abundance to my neighbour, for if i do i myself shall be left with little." we should like to be able to scatter riches with a royal hand; and, therefore, when we see someone else clutching his rags with the phrase, "property is sacred," we are hurt. what is sacred comes from the gods, and the gods have plenty of everything, they do not count and skimp, like mortals.

we see a man repent for his actions, and conclude that such actions should be avoided: an instance of false, but apparently irreproachable reasoning. time passes, and we see the same man repenting again of the self-same acts. if we love logic, this will confirm us in our first conclusion. but if we do not care for logic, we shall say: man is under an equal necessity to commit these acts, and to repent of them. sometimes, however, the first conclusion is corrected differently. having decided that repentance proves that a certain course of action should be avoided, man avoids it all his life; only to realise in the end, suddenly, with extraordinary clarity, how bitter is his regret that he has not trodden the forbidden course. but by this time a new conclusion is already useless. life is over, and the newly-enlightened mind no longer knows how to rid itself of the superfluous light.

a version of one of the scenes of tolstoy's power of darkness reminds us exactly of a one-act piece of maeterlinck. there can be no question of imitation. when the power of darkness was written nobody had heard of maeterlinck. tolstoy evidently wanted to try a new method of creating, and to get rid of his own manner, which he had evolved through tens of years of dogged labour. but the risk was too great. he preferred to cure himself of his doubts by the common expedient, manual toil and an outdoor life. so he took up the plough.

every woodcock praises its own fen; lermontov saw the sign of spiritual pre-eminence in dazzling white linen, and therefore his heroes always dressed with taste. dostoevsky, on the other hand, despised show: dmitri karamazov wears dirty linen—and this is assigned to him as a merit, or almost a merit.

while he was yet young, when he wrote his story, enough, turgenev saw that something terrible hung over his life. he saw, but did not get frightened, although he understood that in time he ought to become frightened, because life without a continual inner disturbance would have no meaning for him.

napoleon is reputed to have had a profound insight into the human soul; shakespeare also. and their vision has nothing in common.

what we call imagination, which we value so highly in great poets—is, essentially, unbridled, loose, or if you will, even perverted mentality. in ordinary mortals we call it vice; but to the poets everything is forgiven on account of the benefit and pleasure we derive from their works. in spite of our high-flown theories we have always been extremely practical, great utilitarians. two-and-a-half-thousand years went by before tolstoy got up, and, in his turn, offered the poets their choice: either to be virtuous, or to stop creating and forfeit the fame of teachers. if tolstoy did not make a laughing-stock of himself, he has to thank his grey hairs and the respect which was felt for his past. anyhow, nobody took him seriously. far from it; for never yet did poets feel so free from the shackles of morality as they do now. if schiller were writing his dramas and philosophic essays to-day, he would scarcely find a reader. in tolstoy himself it is not so much his virtues as his vices which we find interesting. we begin to understand his works, not so much in the light of his striving after ideals, but from the standpoint of that incongruity which existed between the ideas he artificially imposed upon himself, and the demands of his own non-virtu ous soul, which struggled ever for liberty. nicolenka irtenyev, in childhood, and youth, would sit for hours on the terrace, turning over in his mind his elder brother volodya's love-making with the chambermaids. but, although he desired it "more than anything on earth" he could never bring himself to be like volodya. the maid said to the elder brother, "why doesn't nicolai fetrovitch ever come here and have a lark?" she did not know that nicolai petrovitch was sitting at that moment under the stairs, ready to give anything on earth to take the place of the scamp volodya. "everything on earth" is twice repeated. tolstoy gives a psychological explanation of his little hero's conduct. "i was timid by nature," nicolenka tells us, "but my shyness was increased by the conviction of my ugliness." ugliness, the consciousness of one's ugliness, leads to shyness! what good can there be in virtue which has such a suspicious origin? and how can the morality of tolstoy's heroes be trusted i consciousness of one's ugliness begets shyness, shyness drives the passions inwards and allows them no natural outlet. little by little there develops a monstrous discrepancy between the imagination and its desires, on the one hand, and the power to satisfy these desires, on the other. permanent hunger, and a contracted alimentary canal, which does not pass the food through. hence the hatred of the imagination, with its unrealised and unrealisable cravings.... in our day no one has scourged love so cruelly as tolstoy in power of darkness. but the feats of the village don juan need not necessarily end in tragedy. "more than anything on earth," however, tolstoy hates the don juans, the handsome, brave, successful, the self-confident, who spontaneously act upon suggestion, the conquerors of women, who stretch out their hands to living statues cold as stone. as far as ever he can he has his revenge on them in his writing.

in the drama of the future the whole presentation will be different. first of all, the difficulties of the dénouement will be set aside. the new hero has a past-reminiscent—but no present; neither wife, nor sweetheart, nor friends, nor occupation. he is alone, he communes only with himself or with imaginary listeners. he lives a life apart. so that the stage will represent either a desert island or a room in a large densely-populated city, where among millions of inhabitants one can live alone as on a desert island. the hero must not return to people and to social ideals. he must go forward to loneliness, to absolute loneliness. even now nobody, looking at gogol's plyushkin, will feel any more the slightest response to the pathetic appeal for men to preserve the ideals of youth on into old age. modern youths go to see plyushkin, not for the sake of laughing at him or of benefiting from the warning which his terrible miserly figure offers them, but in order to see if there may not be some few little pearls there where they could be least expected, in the midst of his heap of dirt.

... lycurgus succeeded in fixing the spartans like cement for some centuries—but after that came the thaw, and all their hardness melted. the last remains of the petrified doric art are now removed to museums.... is something happening——?

if i sow not in the spring, in autumn i shall eat no bread. every day brings troubles and worries enough for poor, weak man. he had to forget his work for a moment, and now he is lost: he will die of hunger or cold. in order merely to preserve our existence we have to strain mind and body to the utmost: nay more, we have to think of the surrounding world exclusively with a view to gaining a livelihood from it. there is no time to think about truth! this is why positivism was invented, with its theory of natural development. really, everything we see is mysterious and incomprehensible. a tiny midge and a huge elephant, a caressing breeze and a blizzard, a young tree and a rocky mountain—what are all these? what are they, why are they? we incessantly ask ourselves, but we may not speak out. for philosophy is ever pushed aside to make room for the daily needs. only those think who are unable to trouble about self-preservation, or who will not trouble, or who are too careless: that is, sick, desperate, or lazy people. these return to the riddle which workaday men, confirmed in the certainty that they are right, have construed into "naturalness."

kant, and after him schopenhauer, was exceedingly fond of the epithet "disinterested," and used it on every occasion when the supply of laudatory terms he had at his disposal was exhausted. "disinterested thinking," which does not pursue any practical aim, is, according to schopenhauer, the highest ideal towards which man can strive. this truth he considered universal, an a priori. but had he chanced to be brought amongst russian peasants he would have had to change his opinion. with them thoughts about destiny and the why and wherefore of the universe and infinity and so on, would by no means be considered disinterested, particularly if the man who devoted himself to such thoughts were at the same time to announce, as becomes a philosopher, that he claimed complete freedom from physical labour. there the philosopher, were he even plato, would be stigmatised with the disgraceful nickname, "idle-jack." there the highest activity is interested activity, directed towards strictly practical purposes; and if the peasants could speak learnedly, they would certainly call the principle upon which their judgment is founded an a priori. tolstoy, who draws his wisdom from the folk-sources, attacks the learned for the very fact that they do not want to work, but are disinterestedly occupied in the search for truth.

100

it is clear to any impartial observer that practically every man changes his opinion ten times a day. much has been said on this subject, it has served for innumerable satires and humorous sketches. nobody has ever doubted that it was a vice to be unstable is one's opinions. three-fourths of our education goes to teaching us most carefully to conceal within ourselves the changeableness of our moods and judgments. a man who cannot keep his word is the last of men: never to be trusted. likewise, a man with no firm convictions: it is impossible to work together with him. morality, here as always making towards utilitarian ends, issues the "eternal" principle: thou shalt remain true to thy convictions. in cultured circles this commandment is considered so unimpeachable that men are terrified even to appear inconstant in their own eyes. they become petrified in their beliefs, and no greater shame can happen to them than that they should be forced to admit that they have altered in their convictions. when a straightforward man like montaigne plainly speaks of the inconstancy of his mind and his views, he is regarded as a libeller of himself. one need neither see, nor hear, nor understand what is taking place around one: once your mind is made up, you have lost your right to grow, you must remain a stock, a statue, the qualities and defects of which are known to everybody.

101

every philosophic world-conception starts from some or other solution of the general problem of human existence, and proceeds from this to direct the course of human life in some particular direction or other. we have neither the power nor the data for the solution of general problems, and consequently all our moral deductions are arbitrary, they only witness to our prejudices if we are naturally timid, or to our propensities and tastes if we are self-confident. but to keep up prejudices is a miserable, unworthy business: nobody will dispute that. therefore let us cease to grieve about our differences in opinion, let us wish that in the future there should be many more differences, and much less unanimity. there is no arbitrary truth: it remains to suppose that truth lies in changeable human tastes and desires. in so far as our common social existence demands it—let us try to come to an understanding, to agree: but not one jot more. any agreement which does not arise out of common necessity will be a crime against the holy spirit.

102

tchekhov was very good at expounding a system of philosophy—even several systems. we have examples in more than one of his stories, particularly in the duel, where fon-koren speaks ex cathedra. but tchekhov had no use for such systems, save for purely literary purposes. when you write a story, and your hero must speak clearly and consistently, a system has its value. but when you are left to yourself, can you seriously trouble your soul about philosophy? even a german cannot, it seems, go so far in his "idealism." vladimir semionovitch, the young author in tchekhov's nice people, sincerely and deeply believes in his own ideas, but even of him, notwithstanding his blatantly comical limitations, we cannot say more than that his ideas were constant little views or pictures to him, which had gradually become a second natural setting to everything he saw. certainly he did not live by ideas. tchekhov is right when he says that the singing of gaudeamus igitur and the writing of a humanitarian appeal were equally important to vladimir semionovitch. as soon as vladimir's sister begins to think for herself, her brother's highest ideas, which she has formerly revered, become banal and objectionable to her. her brother cannot understand her, neither her hostility to progress and humanitarianism, nor to the university spree and gaudeamus igitur. but tchekhov does understand. only, let us admit, the word "understand" does not carry its ordinary meaning here. so long as the child was fed on its mother's milk, everything seemed to it smooth and easy. but when it had to give up milk and take to vodka,—and this is the inevitable law of human development—the childish suckling dreams receded into the realm of the irretrievable past.

103

the summit of human existence, say the philosophers, is spiritual serenity, aequanimitas: but in that case the animals should be our ideal, for in the matter of imperturbability they leave nothing to be desired. look at a grazing sheep, or a cow. they do not look before and after, and sigh for what is not. given a good pasture, the present suffices them perfectly.

104

a hungry man was given a piece of bread, and a kind word. the kindness seemed more to him than the bread. but had he been given only the kind word and no bread, he would perhaps have hated nice phrases. therefore, caution is always to be recommended in the drawing of conclusions: and in none more than in the conclusion that truth is more urgently required than a consoling lie. the connections of isolated phenomena can very rarely be discerned. as a rule, several causes at once produce one effect. owing to our propensity for idealising, we always make prominent that cause which seems to us loftiest.

105

a strange anomaly! we see thousands of human beings perish around us, yet we walk warily lest we crush a worm. the sense of compassion is strong in us, but it is adapted to the conditions of our existence. it can relieve an odd case here and there—and it raises a terrific outcry over a trifling injustice. yet schopenhauer wanted to make compassion the metaphysical basis of morality.

106

to discard logic as an instrument, a means or aid for acquiring knowledge, would be extravagant. why should we? for the sake of consequentialism? i.e. for logic's very self? but logic, as an aim in itself, or even as the only means to knowledge, is a different matter. against this one must fight even if he has against him all the authorities of thought—beginning with aristotle.

107

"when the yellowing corn-fields sway and are moved, and the fresh forest utters sound to the breeze ... then i see happiness on earth, and god in heaven." it may be so, to the poet; but it may be quite different. sometimes the corn-field waves, the woods make noise in the wind, the stream whispers its best tales: and still man cannot perceive happiness, nor forget the lesson taught in childhood, that the blue heavens are only an optical illusion. but if the sky and the boundless fields do not convince, is it possible that the arguments of kant and the commentations of his dozens of talentless followers can do anything?

108

the greatest temptation.—in dostoevsky's grand inquisitor lurks a dreadful idea. who can be sure, he says—metaphorically, of course—that when the crucified christ uttered his cry: "lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" he did not call to mind the temptation of satan, who for one word had offered him dominion over the world? and, if jesus recollected this offer, how can we be sure that he did not repent not having taken it?... one had better not be told about such temptations.

109

from the "future opinions concerning contemporary europe."—"europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented a strange picture. after luther, christianity degenerated into morality, and all the threads connecting man with god were cut. together with the rationalisation of religion, all life took on a fiat, rational character. knights were replaced by a standing army, recruited on the principle of compulsory military service for all, and existing chiefly for the purpose of parades and official needs. alchemy, which had been trying to find the philosopher's stone, was replaced by chemistry, which tried to discover the best means for cheap preparation of cheap commodities. astrology, which had sought in the stars the destinies of men, was replaced by astronomy, which foretold the eclipses of the sun and the appearing of comets. even the dress of the people became strangely colourless; not only men, but women also wore uniform, monochromatic clothes. most remarkable of all, that epoch did not notice its own insignificance, but was even proud of itself. it seemed to the man of that day that never before had the common treasury of spiritual riches been so well replenished. we, of course, may smile at their na?veté, but if one of their own number had allowed himself to express an opinion disdainful of the bases of the contemporary culture he would have been declared immoral, or put away in a mad-house: a terrible punishment, very common in that coarse period, though now it is very difficult even to imagine what such a proceeding implied. but in those days, to be known as immoral, or to find oneself in a mad-house, was worse than to die. one of the famous poets of the nineteenth century, alexander poushkin, said: 'god forbid that i should go mad. rather let me be a starving beggar.' in those times people, on the whole, were compelled to tell lies and play the hypocrite, so that not infrequently the brightest minds, who saw through the shams of their epoch, yet pretended to believe in science and morality, only in order to escape the persecution of public opinion."

110

writers of tragedies on shakespeare's model.—to obtain a spark, one must strike with all one's might with an iron upon a stone. whereupon there is a loud noise, which many are inclined to believe more important than the little spark. similarly, writers having shouted very loudly, are deeply assured that they have fulfilled their sacred mission, and are amazed that all do not share their raptures, that some even stop their ears and run away.

111

metamorphoses.—sense and folly are not at all native qualities in a man. in a crisis, a stupid man becomes clever. we need not go far for an example. what a gaping simpleton dostoevsky looks in his injured and insulted, not to mention poor folk. but in letters from the underworld and the rest of his books he is the shrewdest and cleverest of writers. the same may be said of nietzsche, tolstoy, or shakespeare. in his birth of tragedy nietzsche seems just like the ordinary honest, rather simple, blue-eyed provincial german student, and in zarathustra he reminds one of machiavelli. poor shakespeare got himself into a row for his brutus—but no man could deny the great mind in hamlet. the best instance of all, however, is tolstoy. right up to to-day, whenever he likes he can be cleverer than the cleverest. yet at times he is a schoolboy. this is the most interesting and enviable trait in him.

112

in troilus and cressida thersites says: "shall the elephant ajax carry it thus? he beats me, and i rail at him: o worthy satisfaction! would it were otherwise; that i could beat him, whilst he railed at me." dostoevsky might have said the same of his opponents. he pursued them with stings, sarcasm, abuse, and they drove him to a white heat by their quiet assurance and composure.... the present-day admirers of dostoevsky quietly believe in the teachings of their master. does it not mean that de facto they have betrayed him and gone over to the side of his enemies.

113

the opinion has gained ground that turgenev's ideal women—natalie, elena, marianna—are created in the image and likeness of poushkin's tatyana. the critics have been misled by external appearances. to poushkin his tatyana appears as a vestal guarding the sacred flame of high morality—because such a job is not fitting for a male. the pretender in boris godunov says to the old monk pimen, who preaches meekness and submission: "but you fought under the walls of kazan, etc." that is a man's work. but in the hours of peace and leisure the fighter needs his own hearth-side, he must feel assured that at home his rights are safely guarded. this is the point of tatyana's last words: "i belong to another, and shall remain forever true to him." but in turgenev woman appears as the judge and the reward, sometimes even the inspirer of victorious man. there is a great difference.

114

from a german introduction to philosophy.—"we shall maintain the opinion that metaphysics, as the crown of the particular sciences, is possible and desirable, and that to it falls the task intermediate between theory and practice, experiment and anticipation, mind and feeling, the task of weighing probabilities, balancing arguments, and reconciling difficulties." thus metaphysics is a weighing of probabilities. ergo—further than probable conclusions it cannot go. thus why do metaphysicians pretend to universal and obligatory, established and eternal judgments? they go beyond themselves. in the domain of metaphysics there cannot and must not be any established beliefs. the word established loses all its sense in the connection. it is reasonable to speak of eternal hesitation and temporality of thought.

115

from another introduction to philosophy, also german. "compared with the delusion of the materialists ... the wretchedest worshipper of idols seems to us a being capable of apprehending to a certain degree the great meaning and essence of things," perhaps this thought strayed in accidentally among the huge herd of the other thoughts of the professor, so little does it resemble the rest. but even so, it loses none of its interest. if the materialists here spoken of, those of the nineteenth century, buchner, vogt, moleschot, all of them men who stood on the pinnacle of natural science, were capable of proving in the realm of philosophy more uninformed than the nakedest savage, then it follows, not only that science has nothing in common with philosophy, but that the two are even hostile. therefore we ought to go to the savages, not to civilise them, but even to learn philosophy from them. a papuan or a tierra del fuegan delivering a lecture in philosophy to the professors of the berlin university—friedrich paulsen, for example—is a curious sight. i say to friedrich paulsen, and not to buchner or moleschot, because paulsen is also an educated person, and therefore his philosophic sensibility may have suffered from contact with science, even if not so badly as that of the materialists. he needs the assistance of a red-skinned master. why have german professors so little daring or enterprise? why should not paulsen, on his own initiative, go to patagonia to perfect himself in philosophy?—or at least send his pupils there, and preach broadcast the new pilgrimage. and now lo and behold he has hatched an original and fertile idea, so he will stick in a corner with it, so that even if you wanted you could not get a good look at it. the idea is important and weighty: our philosophers would lose nothing by sitting at the feet of the savages.

116

from a history of ethics.—"doubts concerning the existence or the possibility of discovering a moral norm have, of course (i underline it), proved a stimulus to a new speculative establishing of ethics, just as the denial of the possibility of knowledge led to the discovery of the condition of knowledge." with this proposition the author does not play hide-and-seek, as paulsen with his. he places it in a conspicuous position, in a conspicuous section of his book, and accompanies it with the trumpeting herald "of course." but only one thing is clear: namely, that the majority share the opinion of professor yodl, to whom the quoted words belong. so that the first assumption of ethics has as its foundation the consensus sapientium. it is enough.

117

"the normative theory," which has taken such hold in germany and russia, bears the stamp of that free and easy self-assurance which characterises the state of contentment, and which does not desire, even for the sake of theoretical perfection, to take into consideration the divided state of soul which usually accompanies discontent. windelband (praeludien, p. 313) is evidence of this. he exposes himself with the naive frankness almost of an irrational creature, and is not only unashamed, but even proud of his part. "philosophic research," he says, "is possible only to those who are convinced that the norm of the universal imperative is supreme above individual activities, and that such a norm is discoverable." not every witness will give evidence so honestly. it amounts to this: that philosophic research is not a search after truth, but a conspiracy amongst people who dethrone truth and exalt instead the all-binding norm. the task is truly ethical: morality always was and always will be utilitarian and bullying. its active principle is: he who is not with us, is against us.

118

"if, besides the reality which is evident to us, we were susceptible to another form of reality, chaotic, lawless, then this latter could not be the subject of thought." (riehl—philosophie der gegenwart.) this is one of the a priori of critical philosophy—one of the unproved first assumptions, evidently. it is only an expression in other words of windelband's assertion quoted above, concerning the ethical basis of the law of causation. thus, the a priori of contemporary thought convince us more and more that nietzsche's instinct was not at fault. the root of all our philosophies lies, not in our objective observations, but in the demands of our own heart, in the subjective, moral will, and therefore science cannot be uprooted except we first destroy morality.

119

one of the lofty truisms—"the philosopher conquers passion by perceiving it, the artist by bodying it forth." in german it sounds still more lofty: but does not for that reason approach any nearer to the truth. "der philosoph überwindet die leidenschaft, indem er sie begreift—der künstler, indem er sie darstellt." (windelband, praeludien, p. 198.)

120

the germans always try to get at allgemeingültigkeit. well, if the problem of knowledge is to fathom all the depths of actual life, then experience, in so far as it repeats itself, is uninteresting, or at least has a limit of interest. it is necessary, however, to know what nobody yet knows, and therefore we must walk, not on the common road of allgemeingültigkeit, but on new tracks, which have never yet seen human feet. thus morality, which lays down definite rules and thereby guards life for a time from any surprise, exists only by convention, and in the end collapses before the non-moral surging-up of individual human aspirations. laws—all of them—have only a regulating value, and are necessary only to those who want rest and security. but the first and essential condition of life is lawlessness. laws are a refreshing sleep—lawlessness is creative activity.

121

a = a.—they say that logic does not need this postulate, and could easily develop it by deduction. i think not. on the contrary, in my opinion, logic could not exist without this premiss. meanwhile it has a purely empirical origin. in the realm of fact, a is always more or less equal to a. but it might be otherwise. the universe might be so constituted as to admit of the most fantastic metamorphoses. that which now equals a would successively equal b and then c, and so on. at present a stone remains long enough a stone, a plant a plant, an animal an animal. but it might be that a stone changed into a plant before our eyes, and the plant into an animal. that there is nothing unthinkable in such a supposition is proved by the theory of evolution. this theory only puts centuries in place of seconds. so that, in spite of the risk to which i expose myself from the admirers of the famous epicurean system, i am compelled to repeat once more that anything you please may come from anything you please, that a may not equal a, and that consequently logic is dependent, for its soundness, on the empirically-derived law of the unchangeableness of the external world. admit the possibility of supernatural interference—and logic will lose that certitude and inevitability of its conclusions which at present is so attractive to us.

122

the effort to understand people, life, the universe prevents us from getting to know them at all. since "to know" and "to understand" are two concepts which are not only non-identical, but just the opposite of one another in meaning; in spite of their being in constant use as synonyms. we think we have understood a phenomenon if we have included it in a list of others, previously known to us. and, since all our mental aspiration reduces itself to understanding the universe, we refuse to know a great deal which will not adapt itself to the plane surface of the contemporary world-conceptions. for instance the leibnitz question, put by kant into the basis of the critique of reason: "how can we know a thing outside us, if it does not enter into us?" it is non-understandable; that is, it does not agree with our notion of understanding. hence it follows that it must be squeezed out of the field of view—which is exactly what kant attempted to do. to us it seems, on the contrary, that in the interests of knowing we should sacrifice, and gladly, understanding, since understanding in any case is a secondary affair.-zu fragmentarish ist welt und leben!...