Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/483

 in one way or another, and those most varied gratifications of lust, which attract you on all sides and which you are able to satisfy. Such a state seems to you quite natural and cannot seem otherwise, and you are not at all to blame because it appears so to you, for you grew up in it, and your companions are in the same condition,―but this state is quite exclusive and terribly dangerous. It is terribly dangerous because, if you are to place the whole aim of your life in such a gratification, as it is with you young men, when these lusts are new and especially strong, then it is bound to happen, according to a very well known and indubitable law, that, in order to receive the satisfaction which one is accustomed to receive from the gratification of the appetites, or from savoury food, driving, play, attire, music, one would have to keep adding objects of lust, because lust, once satisfied, does not furnish that enjoyment a second and a third time, and one has to gratify new and stronger lusts. (There even exists a law from which we know that enjoyment increases in an arithmetical progression, while the means for the production of this enjoyment have to be increased by squares.)

And since of all the lusts the strongest is the sexual, which is expressed in enamourment, fondling, onanism, and cohabitation, it always and very soon arrives at this, which is always one and the same. When for these enjoyments can no longer be substituted something new, something stronger, there begins the artificial increase of this very enjoyment by means of intoxicating oneself with wine, tobacco, and sensuous music. This is such a usual path that upon it walk, with rare exceptions, all young men, both rich and poor, and if they stop in time, they return to real life more or less crippled, or perish altogether, as hundreds of young men have perished in my sight.

There is but one salvation in your state: to stop, to come to your senses, to look about, and to find ideals for