Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/453

 This is impossible. But nevertheless we all live, and all our activity, all our strivings for wealth, for family, for fame, for power, are nothing more or less than attempts to make others love us more than they love themselves.

Wealth, fame, power, give us something like that condition of things, and we are almost satisfied; for a time we forget that this is only an illusion and not the reality.

All beings love themselves more than they love us, and happiness is impossible. There are men—and the number of them is increasing every day—who cannot solve this difficulty, and who kill themselves, declaring that life is an empty and stupid jest. But in the meantime the solution of the riddle is more than simple, and offers itself. I can be happy only in a worldly order where all beings should love others more than themselves. The whole world would be happy if all beings loved, not themselves, but their fellows.

I am a being, a man, and reason gives me the law of universal well-being. And I ought to follow this law of my reason, I ought to love others more than myself.

And a man has only to come to this conclusion, for life suddenly to present itself to him from an entirely different standpoint from what it did before.

Beings annihilate one another, but at the same time beings love and assist one another. Life is subjected, not to the passion of destructiveness, but to the feeling of mutuality, which, in the language of our hearts, is called love.

However much I may see development in the life of the world, I see in it only the manifestation of this principle of mutual help. All history is nothing else than an ever clearer and clearer display of this unique principle of the common agreement of all beings.

This opinion is supported both by historical experiment and by personal experiment. But beside the opinion, man finds a most convincing proof of the justice of this opinion in his inner immediate consciousness. The greatest good which man knows, the consciousness of fullest freedom and happiness, is the condition of self