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_ These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger
from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought,
and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt
from the aim he was pursuing.
Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become
convinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he
had read and reread thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling,
Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a
non-materialistic explanation of life.
Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was
himself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially
those of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or
sought fat himself a solution of problems, the same thing always
happened. As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscure
words such as SPIRIT, WILL, FREEDOM, ESSENCE, purposely letting
himself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him,
he seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the
artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to
what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the
fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces
at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the
edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart
from anything in life more important than reason.
At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his will
the word love, and for a couple of days this new philosophy
charmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But then,
when he turned from life itself to glance at it again, it fell
away too, and proved to be the same muslin garment with no warmth
in it.
His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological
works of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov's
works, and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative
style which at first repelled him, he was impressed by the
doctrine of the church he found in them. He was struck at first
by the idea that the apprehension of divine truths had not been
vouchsafed to man, but to a corporation of men bound together by
love--to the church. What delighted him was the thought how much
easier it was to believe in a still existing living church,
embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head, and
therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept the faith in
God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption, than to begin
with God, a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. But
afterwards, on reading a Catholic writer's history of the church,
and then a Greek orthodox writer's history of the church, and
seeing that the two churches, in their very conception
infallible, each deny the authority of the other, Homiakov's
doctrine of the church lost all its charm for him, and this
edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers' edifices.
All that spring he was not himself, and went through fearful
moments of horror.
"Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life's impossible;
and that I can't know, and so I can't live," Levin said to
himself.
"In infinite time, in infinite matter, in infinite space, is
formed a bubble-organism, and that bubble lasts a while and
bursts, and that bubble is Me."
It was an agonizing error, but it was the sole logical result of
ages of human thought in that direction.
This was the ultimate belief on which all the systems elaborated
by human thought in almost all their ramifications rested. It was
the prevalent conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had
unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it, as any way the
clearest, and made it his own.
But it was not merely a falsehood, it was the cruel jeer of some
wicked power, some evil, hateful power, to whom one could not
submit.
He must escape from this power. And the means of escape every man
had in his own hands. He had but to cut short this dependence on
evil. And there was one means--death.
And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was
several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might
not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his
gun for fear of shooting himself.
But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he
went on living. _
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