Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/70

 the infinite,—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation, and death. Consequently in faith alone could we find the meaning and possibility of life. What, then, was faith? I understood that faith was not merely an evidence of things not seen, and so forth, not revelation (that is only the description of one of the symptoms of faith), not the relation of man to man (faith has to be defined, and then God, and not first God, and faith through him), not merely an agreement with what a man was told, as faith was generally understood,—that faith was the knowledge of the meaning of human life, in consequence of which man did not destroy himself, but lived. Faith is the power of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that he ought to live for some purpose, he would not live. If he does not see and understand the phantasm of the finite, he believes in that finite; if he understands the phantasm of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith one cannot live.

I recalled the whole course of my internal work, and I was frightened. Now it was clear to me that, in order that a man might live, he either must not see the infinite, or must have such an explanation of the meaning of life that the finite is equated to the infinite. I had such an explanation, but it was useless to me so long as I believed in the finite and tried to verify it by reason. Before the light of reason all the former explanation was scattered to the winds; but there came a time when I stopped believing in the finite. Then I began on a rational basis to build from what I knew an explanation which would give me the meaning of life; but nothing came of it. With the best minds of humanity I arrived at the result that $$0 = 0$$, and I was very much surprised when I received such a solution, whereas nothing else could have come from it.

What had I been doing when I had been looking for