Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/42

 рогtancе and seriousness of tone which science assumed, when it enunciated its principles which had nothing in common with the questions of human life, that there was something in it which I did not understand. For a long time I was intimidated by science, and it seemed to me that the inapplicability of the answers to my questions was not the fault of science, but of my own ignorance; but the matter was for me not a joke, a trifle, but an affair of my whole life, and I was against my will led to the conviction that my questions were the only legitimate questions, which served as a foundation of all knowledge, and that not I with my questions was to blame, but science, if it had the presumption to answer these questions.

My question, the one which led me, at fifty years, up to suicide, was the simplest kind of a question, and one which is lying in the soul of every man, from the silliest child to the wisest old man,—that question without which life is impossible, as I have experienced it, in fact. The question is: “What will come of what I am doing to-day and shall do to-morrow? What will come of my whole life?”

Differently expressed, the question would stand like this: “Why live, wish for anything, why do anything?” The question may be expressed still differently: “Is there in my life a meaning which would not be destroyed by my inevitable, imminent death?”

To this one, differently expressed, question I searched for an answer in human knowledge. I found that in relation to this question all human knowledge seemed to be divided into two opposite hemispheres, at the opposite ends of which there were two poles: one, a negative, the other, a positive pole; but that at neither pole was there an answer to the questions of life.

One series of the sciences does not seem to recognize the question, but clearly and definitely answers its own, independently put questions: that is the series of the