was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from
anywhere.
“Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived at knowing
that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I was told that in my
childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my
soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for
existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the
satisfaction of our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But loving one’s
neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.”
Chapter 13
And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly
and her children. The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking
raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s mouths
with a syringe. Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began
reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the
grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they
smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that
if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.
And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which
the children heard what their mother said to them. They were simply
annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a
word of what their mother was saying. They could not believe it indeed, for
they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so
could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they
lived by.
“That all comes of itself,” they thought, “and there’s nothing interesting
or important about it because it has always been so, and always will be so.
And it’s all always the same. We’ve no need to think about that, it’s all
ready. But we want to invent something of our own, and new. So we
thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking them over a candle, and
squirting milk straight into each other’s mouths. That’s fun, and something
new, and not a bit worse than drinking out of cups.”
“Isn’t it just the same that we do, that I did, searching by the aid of reason
for the significance of the forces of nature and the meaning of the life of
man?” he thought.
“And don’t all the theories of philosophy do the same, trying by the path
of thought, which is strange and not natural to man, to bring him to a
knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he
could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the
development of each philosopher’s theory, that he knows what is the chief
significance of life beforehand, just as positively as the peasant Fyodor, and
not a bit more clearly than he, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual
path to come back to what everyone knows?
“Now then, leave the children to themselves to get things alone and make
their crockery, get the milk from the cows, and so on. Would they be
naughty then? Why, they’d die of hunger! Well, then, leave us with our
passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or
without any idea of what is right, without any idea of moral evil.
“Just try and build up anything without those ideas!
“We only try to destroy them, because we’re spiritually provided for.
Exactly like the children!
“Whence have I that joyful knowledge, shared with the peasant, that
alone gives peace to my soul? Whence did I get it?
“Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with
the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, full of them, and living on
those blessings, like the children I did not understand them, and destroy,
that is try to destroy, what I live by. And as soon as an important moment of
life comes, like the children when they are cold and hungry, I turn to Him,
and even less than the children when their mother scolds them for their
childish mischief, do I feel that my childish efforts at wanton madness are
reckoned against me.
“Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me,
revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing
taught by the church.
“The church! the church!” Levin repeated to himself. He turned over on
the other side, and leaning on his elbow, fell to gazing into the distance at a
herd of cattle crossing over to the river.
