Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/150

 134 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

tive, personal relation ; (2) the pagan, social, or family- State relation ; (3) the Christian or divine relation.

Strictly speaking there are only two fundamental relations in which man can stand towards the world : the Perso)tal, wliich sees the meaning of life in personal well-heing, ohtained separately, or in union with other individuals ; and the Christian, wliich sees the meaning of life to consist in service of him who sent man into the world. The second of the three divisions men- tioned in the first classification — the social — is really only an extension of tlie first.

The first of these perceptions, the oldest — now found among people on the lowest plane of moral develop- ment — consists in man considering himself to be a self- motived being, living in the world to obtain the greatest possible ])ersonal happiness, regardless of the suffering such attainment may cause to others.

From this very primitive relation to the world (a relation in wliich every infant lives on first entering the world ; in which humanity lived during the first, pagan, period of its development ; and in which many of the morally-coarsest individuals and savage tribes still live) flowed the ancient pagan religions, as vell as the lowest forms of the later religions : Buddhism,* Taoism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity, in their perverted forms. From this relation to the world comes also modern Spiritualism, which has, at its root, a desire for the preservation and well-being of one's personality. All the pagan cults : divinations ; the deification of beings who enjoy themselves like man ; Saints who intercede for man ; all sacrifices and prayers offered

renunciation of worldly blessings, and even of life itself, is based on the same relation of a self-motived personality (predestined to personal well-being) to the suiTounding universe ; but with this difference— that simple paganism considers man to have a right to happiness, while Buddhism considers that the world ought to disappear because it pro- duces suffering to the personality. Buddhism is negative paganism.
 * Buddhism, though demanding from its followers the