Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/57

 mankind (which has ever advanced from dissoluteness to Greater and greater purity), and accord also with the moral perceptions of the community, and with our conscience, which always condemns dissoluteness and esteems chastity. Secondly, because these propositions are merely unavoidable conclusions from the Gospel teaching, which we either profess or at least (even if unconsciously) admit to lie at the root of our ideas of morality.

But I was mistaken.

No one, it is true, directly disputes the statements that one should not be dissolute either before or after marriage, should not artificially prevent childbirth, should not make toys of one's children, and should not put amatory intercourse above everything else. In short, no one denies that chastity is better than depravity. But it is said: 'If abstinence is better than marriage, people ought certainly to follow the better course. But if they do, then the human race will come to an end, and the ideal for the race cannot be—its own extinction.' But—apart from the fact that the extinction of the human race is not a new idea, but is for religious people one of the dogmas of their faith, and for scientists an inevitable conclusion from observations of the cooling of the sun—there is in that rejoinder a great, wide-spread, and old misunderstanding. It is said: 'If men act up to the ideal of perfect chastity, they will become extinct; therefore the ideal is false.' But those who speak so, intentionally or unintentionally confuse two different things—a rule or precept, and an ideal.

Chastity is not a rule or precept, but an ideal, or, rather, one condition of the ideal. But an ideal is an ideal only when its accomplishment is only possible in idea, in thought, when it appears attainable only in infinity, and when the possibility of approaching towards it is therefore infinite. If the ideal were attained, or if we