Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/51

 “Having learned the internal essence of the world as will, and in all the phenomena, from the unconscious striving of the dark forces of Nature to the full consciousness of the activity of man, having learned only the objectivity of this will, we shall by no means escape the consequence that with the free negation, the self-destruction of the will, there will disappear all those phenomena, that constant striving and tendency without aim or rest on all the stages of objectivity, in which and through which the world exists; there will disappear the diversity of consecutive forms, and with the form will disappear all its phenomena with their general forms, space and time, and, finally, its last fundamental form, subject and object. When there is no will, there is no concept, no world. Before us nothing only is left. But what opposes this transition to nothingness, our nature, is that very will to exist (Wille zum Leben), which forms ourselves as well as the world. That we are so afraid of nothingness, or, what is the same, that we desire to live, signifies that we ourselves are nothing but that desire to live and that we know nothing else. Therefore, what will be left after the complete annihilation of the will for us who are still full of that will is naturally nothing; and, on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned away and renounced itself, this our so real world, with all its suns and milky ways, is nothing.”

“Vanity of vanities,” says Solomon, “vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said. See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither