Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/62

Rh Only one explanation of this amazing fact presents itself to me.

All human history from the earliest times and to our day may be considered as a movement of the consciousness, both of individuals and of homogeneous groups, from lower ideas to higher ones. The whole path, travelled both by individuals and by homogeneous groups, may be represented as a consecutive fight of steps from the very lowest, on the level of animal life, to the very highest to which the consciousness of man has attained at a given moment of history.

Each man, like each separate homogeneous group, nation, or State, always moved and moves up this ladder of ideas. Some portions of humanity move on, others lag far behind, others, again,—the majority,—move somewhere between the most advanced and the most backward. But all, on whatever step they stand, are inevitably and irresistibly moving from lower to higher ideas. And always, at any given moment, both the individuals and the separate groups of people—advanced, middle, or backward—stand in three different relations to three stages of ideas, amid which they move.

Always, both for the individual and for the separate groups of people, there are the ideas of the past, which are worn out and have become strange to them, and to which they cannot revert: as, for instance, in our Christian world the ideas of cannibalism, universal plunder, the rape of