Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/148

 132 ESSAYS AND LEITERS

them try to escape death. But if they invented an eternal and powerful beine^ on whom they supj)osed themselves to depend^ and if tliey invented live souls for dead people, they did this not simply from fear, but for some other reasons. And in those reasons, evidently, lay the essence of the thin^ we call relijjion.

Moreover, every man who has ever, even in child- hood, experienced religious feeling, knows by personal experience that it was evoked in liim, not by external, terrifying, material phenomena, but by an inner con- sciousness, which had nothing to do with fear of the unknown forces of Nature — a consciousness of his own insignificance, loneliness, and guilt. And therefore, both by external observation and by pergonal experi- ence, man may know that religion is not the worship of gods, evoked by superstitious fear of the invisible forces of Nature, proper to men only at a certain period of their development ; but is something quite inde- pendent either of fear or of their degree of education — a something that cainiot be destroyed by any develop- ment of culture. For man's consciousness of his finite- ness amid an infinite universe, and of his sinfulness (i.e., of his not having done all he might and should have done) has always existed and will exist as long as man remains man.

Indeed, everyone on emerging from the animal con- ditions of infancy and earliest childliood, when he lives guided only by 'the demands of his animal nature — everyone on awakening to rational consciousness, can- not but notice that all around him lives, renewing itself, undestroyed, and infallibly conforming to one, definite, eternal law : and that he alone, recognising himself as a being separate from the rest of the universe, is sentenced to die, to disappear into infinite space and endless time, and to sutfer the tormenting conscious- ness of responsibility for his actions — i.e., the con- sciousness that, having acted badly, he could hare done better. And understanding this, no reasonable man can help pausing to ask himself, ^ 'hat is the meaning of my momentary, uncertain, and unstable