Page:The Relations Tolstoy.pdf/44

 The sexual instinct is a striving if not to fulfill the whole law, at all events to insure the possibility of its fulfillment by one's descendants. The truth of this is also corroborated in the experience of the separate individual: the more a man approaches the fulfillment of the law the more is he repelled from the sexual passion, and vice-versa.

The sexual act is so attractive because it is the deliverance of oneself from an obligation: it is it were frees one form the fulfillment of the law, and transfers this obligation to others. It is not I who will be attaining the Kingdom of God, but my children. This is why women become so absorbed in their children.

With N— who attacked the ideal of chastity from the point of view of regard for the continuation of the race, I expressed the following: According to the Church belief the end of the world must ensue; so also according to science the life of man on earth, and earth itself, must cease. What is it that so revolts men, then, in the idea of the possibility that a moral righteous life will also bring the race to an end? Perhaps the one and the other will coincide. In a Shaker article this is even suggested. It is stated there, "Why should not men by abstinence deliver themselves from violent death?" Excellent.

There is a calculation of Herschel's by which it appears that if the human population had doubled every year from the beginning, as it does now, then, reckoning 7,000 years since the first pair, the number of human beings at the present time would be so great that if placed one on top of the other on the earth the apex of the pyramid would reach not only the sun but 27 times that distance.