Page:Leo Tolstoy - The Russian Revolution (1907).djvu/45

 28 means being subject to all sorts of the gravest calamities in wars foreign or civil.

What is the cause of this?

The cause of it is, that people when yielding to power do not reason, but act under the influence of something that has always been one of the most widespread motives of human action, and has lately been most carefully studied and explained; it is called "suggestion" or hypnotism. This hypnotism, preventing people from acting in accordance with their reasonable nature and theirown interest, and forcing them to do what is unreasonable and disadvantageous, causes them to believe that the violence perpetrated by people calling themselves "the Government" is not simply the immoral conduct of immoral men, but is the action of some mysterious, sacred Being, called the State, without which men never have existed (which is quite untrue) and never can exist.

But how can reasonable beings, men, submit to such a surprising suggestion, contrary to reason, feeling, and to their own interest?

The answer to this question is, that not only do children, the mentally diseased and idiots, succumb to hypnotic influence and suggestion, but all persons, to the extent to which their religious consciousness is weakened: their consciousness of their relation to the Supreme Cause on which their existence depends. And the majority of the people of our times more and more lack this consciousness.

The reason that most people of our time lack this consciousness is that having once committed the sin of submitting to human power, and not acknowledging this sin to be a sin, but trying to hide it from themselves, or to justify it, they have exalted the power to which they submit to such an extent that it has replaced God's law for them. When human law replaced divine law, men lost religious consciousness and fell under the governmental hypnotism, which suggests to them the illusion that those who enslave them are not simply lost, vicious men, but are repre-