Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/79

 necessary, first of all, that life should not be meaningless and evil, and then only was reason needed for the understanding of it. I comprehended why I had so long walked around such a manifest truth, and that if I were to think and speak of the life of humanity, I ought to think and speak of the life of humanity, and not of the life of a few parasites of life. This truth had always been a truth, just as two times two was four, but I had not recognized it because, if I recognized that two times two was four, I should have had to recognize that I was not good, whereas it was more important and obligatory for me to feel myself good than to feel that two times two was four. I came to love good people and to hate myself, and I recognized the truth. Now everything became clear to me.

What would happen if a hangman, who passes all his life in torturing and chopping off heads, or a desperate drunkard, or an insane man, who has passed all his life in a dark room which he has defiled, and who imagines that he will perish if he leaves that room,—if any of them should ask himself what life is, naturally he could get no other answer to this question than that life is the greatest evil, and the answer of the insane man would be quite correct, but for him alone. What if I was just such a madman? What if all of us, rich men of leisure, were such madmen? And I comprehended that we were indeed such madmen,—I certainly was.

Indeed, a bird lives for the purpose of flying, collecting its food, building its nest, and when I see the bird doing that, I rejoice at its joy. A goat, a hare, a wolf exists in such a way that they have to feed, multiply, and rear their young ones, and when they do so, I have the firm conviction that they are happy, and that their life is rational. What, then, ought man to do? He must procure his sustenance like the animals, but with this difference, that he will perish if he procures it by himself,