Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/364

 "Why? In order to live."

"Why should we live? If there is no aim, if life is given us for life's sake, there is no reason for living. And if it is so, then Schopenhauer and Hartmann, and all the Buddhists are quite right. Well, if there is an aim in life, it is evident that life must cease when that aim is reached. That is what it comes to," he said, with agitation, apparently very proud of his idea. "That is what it comes to. You must notice that if the aim of humanity is goodness,—love, if you wish,—if the aim of humanity is that which is mentioned in the prophecies, when all people will unite together in love, and the spears will be forged into sickles, and so forth, then what is in the way of the accomplishment of this aim?—The passions. Of all the passions, the sexual, carnal love is the strongest, the most evil and stubborn; therefore, if all the passions are to be destroyed, this latter, the strongest of them all, carnal love, will also be destroyed, and the prophecy will be fulfilled, people will be united, the aim of humanity will be reached, and there will be no reason for it to exist. As long as the human race exists, the ideal is before it, and, of course, not the ideal of rabbits and swine, which is to breed as fast as possible, and not of monkeys and Parisians, to use in the most refined manner the enjoyments of sexual passion, but the ideal of goodness, which is reached through continence and purity. People have always striven for this. And see what comes of it!

"It turns out that carnal love is a safety-valve. If the present, living generation of the human race has not reached its aim, it has not reached it because it has passions, and the strongest of them is the sexual passion. As long as there is sexual passion there is a new generation, consequently there is a possibility for the next generation to reach the aim. If this one does not reach it, the next may, and so it goes on until it will be at-