Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/194

Rh In truth, every man, as soon as he emerges from the animal existence of infancy and childhood—during which he lives by the pressure of those claims which are presented to him by his animal nature—every man who is awake to reasonable consciousness cannot fail to remark how the life about him renews itself, undestroyed, and steadfastly subordinate to one definite eternal law; and that he alone, self-recognised as a creature separate from the entire universe, is condemned to death, to a disappearance in unbounded space and limitless time, and to the painful consciousness of responsibility for his actions—a consciousness, so to say, that, having acted not well, he might have acted better. And, with this understanding, every reasoning man must stop, think, and ask himself—wherefore this momentary, indefinite, unstable existence within a universe uncompassed, eternal, firmly defined?

Man cannot, when he enters into his full measure of life, elude this question. It confronts all, and all in some fashion answer it, and it is this answer which is the essence of religion; the answer to the question, Wherefore do I live, and what is my relation to the infinite universe about me? All religious metaphysics—their teaching as to deities, the origin of existence, external worship—though generally taken for religion, are only the various signs accompanying religion, and changing with a change in its geographical, historical, or ethnographical conditions. There is no