Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/127

 NON-ACTINO 11)

pass over it, like tlouds that pass before the moon ; but the white orb, continuing its course, suddenly reappears from behind thein intact ond shining. Man's irresistible need of an ideal explains why he has accepted with such confidence, such rapture, and without reason's control, the various religious formulas whicl), while j)romising him tlie Infinite, have presented it to him conformably with his nature, enclosing it in the limits always necessary even to the ideal.

But for centuries past, and especially during the last hundred years, at each new stage, new men, more and more numerous, emerge from the darkness, and in the name of reason, science, or observation, dispute the old truths, declare them to be relative, and wish to destroy the fonnula-^ which contain them.

AVho is in the right in this dispute ? All are right whi! they seek ; none are right when they begin to tlireateii. Between truth, which is the aim, and free inquiry, to which all have a right, force is quite out of place, notwithstanding celebrated examples to the contrary. Force njerely drives further back that at which we aim. It is not merely cruel, it is also useless, and that is the worst of faults in all that concerns civilization. No blows, however forcibly delivere<l, will ever prove the existence or the non-existence of God.

To conclude, or, rather, to come to an end, — seeing that the Power, whatever it be, that created the world (which, I think, certainly cannot have created itselO has, for the ])resent, while using us as its instruments, reserved to itself the privilege of knowing why it has made us and whither it is leading us — seeing that this Power (in spite of all inten- tions attributed to it, in spite of all the demands made u])on it) appears ever more and more determined to guard its own secret — I believe, if I may say all I think, that mankind is beginning to cease to try to penetrate that eternal mystery. Mankind went to religions, which proved nothing, for they differed among themselves ; it went to philosophies, which revealed no more, for they contradicted one another ; and it will now try to find its way out of the difficulty by itself, trusting to its own instinct and its own simple good sense ; and since mankind finds itself here on earth without knowing why or how, it is going to try to be as happy as it can with just those means the earth supplies.

Zola recently, in a remarkable address to students, recom- mended to them work as a remedy, and even as a X)anacea^