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ANTON TCHEKHOV THE GIFT OF PROPHECY PENULTIMATE WORDS THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

INTRODUCTION

There were great men and great philosophers. It may be that this cruelly conscious world will henceforward recognise no man as great unless he has greatly sought: for to seek and not to think is the essence of philosophy. To have greatly sought, I say, should be the measure of man's greatness in the strange world of which there will be only a tense, sorrowful, disillusioned remnant when this grim ordeal is over. It should be so: and we, who are, according to our strength, faithful to humanity, must also strive according to our strength to make it so. We are not, and we shall not be, great men: but we have the elements of greatness. We have an impulse to honesty, to think honestly, to see honestly, and to speak the truth to ourselves in the lonely hours. It is only an impulse, which, in these barren, bitter, years, so quickly withers and dies. It is almost that we dare not be honest now. Our hearts are dead: we cannot wake the old wounds again. And yet if anything of this generation that suffered is to remain, if we are to hand any spark of the fire which once burned so brightly, if we are to be human still, then we must still be honest at whatever cost. We--and I speak of that generation which was hardly man when the war burst upon it, which was ardent and generous and dreamed dreams of devotion to an ideal of art or love or life--are maimed and broken for ever. Let us not deceive ourselves. The dead voices will never be silent in our ears to remind us of that which we once were, and that which we have lost. We shall die as we shall live, lonely and haunted by memories that will grow stranger, more beautiful, more terrible, and more tormenting as the years go on, and at the last we shall not know which was the dream--the years of plenty or the barren years that descended like a storm in the night and swept our youth away.

Yet something remains. Not those lying things that they who cannot feel how icy cold is sudden and senseless death to all-daring youth, din in our ears. We shall not be inspired by the memory of heroism. We shall be shattered by the thought of splendid and wonderful lives that were vilely cast away. What remains is that we should be honest as we shall be pitiful. We shall never again be drunk with hope: let us never be blind with fear. There can be in the lap of destiny now no worse thing which may befall us. We can afford to be honest now.

We can afford to be honest: but we need to learn how, or to increase our knowledge. The Russian writers will help us in this; and not the great Russians only, but the lesser also. For a century of bitter necessity has taught that nation that the spirit is mightier than the flesh, until those eager qualities of soul that a century of social ease has almost killed in us are in them well-nigh an instinct. Let us look among ourselves if we can find a Wordsworth, a Shelley, a Coleridge, or a Byron to lift this struggle to the stars as they did the French Revolution. There is none.--It will be said: 'But that was a great fight for freedom. Humanity itself marched forward with the Revolutionary armies.' But if the future of mankind is not in issue now, if we are fighting for the victory of no precious and passionate idea, why is no voice of true poetry uplifted in protest? There is no third way. Either this is the greatest struggle for right, or the greatest crime, that has ever been. The unmistakable voice of poetry should be certain either in protest or enthusiasm: it is silent or it is trivial. And the cause must be that the keen edge of the soul of those century-old poets which cut through false patriotism so surely is in us dulled and blunted. We must learn honesty again: not the laborious and meagre honesty of those who weigh advantage against advantage in the ledger of their minds, but the honesty that cries aloud in instant and passionate anger against the lie and the half-truth, and by an instinct knows the authentic thrill of contact with the living human soul.

Not the least of Shestov's merits is that he is alive to this truth in its twofold working. He is aware of himself as a soul seeking an answer to its own question; and he is aware of other souls on the same quest. As in his own case he knows that he has in him something truer than names and divisions and authorities, which will live in spite of them, so towards others he remembers that all that they wrote or thought or said is precious and permanent in so far as it is the manifestation of the undivided soul seeking an answer to its question. To know a man's work for this, to have divined the direct relation between his utterance and his living soul, is criticism: to make that relation between one's own soul and one's speech direct and true is creation. In essence they are the same: creation is a man's lonely attempt to fix an intimacy with his own strange and secret soul, criticism is the satisfaction of the impulse of loneliness to find friends and secret sharers among the souls that are or have been. As creation drives a man to the knowledge of his own intolerable secrets, so it drives him to find others with whom he may whisper of the things which he has found. Other criticism than this is, in the final issue, only the criminal and mad desire to enforce material order in a realm where all is spiritual and vague and true. It is only the jealous protest of the small soul against the great, of the slave against the free.

Against this smallness and jealousy Shestov has set his face. To have done so does not make him a great writer; but it does make him a real one. He is honest and he is not deceived. But honesty, unless a man is big enough to bear it, and often even when he is big enough to bear it, may make him afraid. Where angels fear to tread, fools rush in: but though the folly of the fool is condemned, some one must enter, lest a rich kingdom be lost to the human spirit. Perhaps Shestov will seem at times too fearful. Then we must remember that Shestov is Russian in another sense than that I have tried to make explicit above. He is a citizen of a country where the human spirit has at all times been so highly prized that the name of thinker has been a key to unlock not merely the mind but the heart also. The Russians not only respect, but they love a man who has thought and sought for humanity, and, I think, their love but seldom stops 'this side idolatry.' They will exalt a philosopher to a god; they are even able to make of materialism a religion. Because they are so loyal to the human spirit they will load it with chains, believing that they are garlands. And that is why dogmatism has never come so fully into its own as in Russia.

When Shestov began to write nearly twenty years ago, Karl Marx was enthroned and infallible. The fear of such tyrannies has never departed from Shestov. He has fought against them so long and so persistently--even in this book one must always remember that he is face to face with an enemy of which we English have no real conception--that he is at times almost unnerved by the fear that he too may be made an authority and a rule. I do not think that this ultimate hesitation, if understood rightly, diminishes in any way from the interest of his writings: but it does suggest that there may be awaiting him a certain paralysis of endeavour. There is indeed no absolute truth of which we need take account other than the living personality, and absolute truths are valuable only in so far as they are seen to be necessary manifestations of this mysterious reality. Nevertheless it is in the nature of man, if not to live by absolute truths, at least to live by enunciating them; and to hesitate to satisfy this imperious need is to have resigned a certain measure of one's own creative strength. We may trust to the men of insight who will follow us to read our dogmatisms, our momentary angers, and our unshakable convictions, in terms of our personalities, if these shall be found worthy of their curiosity or their love. And it seems to me that Shestov would have gained in strength if he could have more firmly believed that there would surely be other Shestovs who would read him according to his own intention. But this, I also know, is a counsel of perfection: the courage which he has not would not have been acquired by any intellectual process, and its possession would have deprived him of the courage which he has. As dogmatism in Russia enjoys a supremacy of which we can hardly form an idea, so a continual challenge to its claims demands in the challenger a courage which it is hard for us rightly to appreciate.

I have not written this foreword in order to prejudice the issue. Shestov will, no doubt, be judged by English readers according to English standards, and I wish no more than to suggest that his greatest quality is one which has become rare among us, and that his peculiarities are due to Russian conditions which have long since ceased to obtain in England. The Russians have much to teach us, and the only way we shall learn, or even know, what we should accept and what reject, is to take count as much as we can of the Russian realities. And the first of these and the last is that in Russia the things of the spirit are held in honour above all others. Because of this the Russian soul is tormented by problems to which we have long been dead, and to which we need to be alive again. J. M. M.

ANTON TCHEKHOV

R?signe-toi, mon coeur, dors ton sommeil de brute.

Yet the just Aristides was right this time too, as he was right when he gave his warning against Dostoevsky. Now that Tchekhov is no more, we may speak openly. Take Tchekhov's stories, each one separately, or better still, all together; look at him at work. He is constantly, as it were, in ambush, to watch and waylay human hopes. He will not miss a single one of them, not one of them will escape its fate. Art, science, love, inspiration, ideals--choose out all the words with which humanity is wont, or has been in the past, to be consoled or to be amused--Tchekhov has only to touch them and they instantly wither and die. And Tchekhov himself faded, withered and died before our eyes. Only his wonderful art did not die--his art to kill by a mere touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and wherein they take their pride. And in this art he was constantly perfecting himself, and he attained to a virtuosity beyond the reach of any of his rivals in European literature. Maupassant often had to strain every effort to overcome his victim. The victim often escaped from Maupassant, though crushed and broken, yet with his life. In Tchekhov's hands, nothing escaped death.

If you desire it, you can easily be rid of Tchekhov and his work as well. Our language contains two magic words: 'pathological,' and its brother 'abnormal.' Once Tchekhov had overstrained himself, you have a perfectly legal right, sanctified by science and every tradition, to leave him out of all account, particularly seeing that he is already dead, and therefore cannot be hurt by your neglect. That is if you desire to be rid of Tchekhov. But if the desire is for some reason absent, the words 'pathological' and 'abnormal' will have no effect upon you. Perhaps you will go further and attempt to find in Tchekhov's experiences a criterion of the most irrefragable truths and axioms of this consciousness of ours. There is no third way: you must either renounce Tchekhov, or become his accomplice.

'The best and most sacred right of kings,' he says, 'is the right to pardon. And I have always felt myself a king so long as I used this right prodigally. I never judged, I was compassionate, I pardoned every one right and left.... But now I am king no more. There's something going on in me which belongs only to slaves. Day and night evil thoughts roam about in my head, and feelings which I never knew before have made their home in my soul. I hate and despise; I'm exasperated, disturbed, and afraid. I've become strict beyond measure, exacting, unkind and suspicious.... What does it all mean? If my new thoughts and feelings come from a change of my convictions, where could the change come from? Has the world grown worse and I better, or was I blind and indifferent before? But if the change is due to the general decline of my physical and mental powers--I am sick and losing weight every day--then I am in a pitiable position. It means that my new thoughts are abnormal and unhealthy, that I must be ashamed of them and consider them valueless....

Doctor Lvov, the representative of the all-powerful, sovereign idea, feels that his sovereign's majesty is injured, that to suffer such an offence really means to abdicate the throne. Surely Ivanov was a vassal, and so he must remain. How dare he let his tongue advise, how dare he raise his voice when it is his part to listen reverently, and to obey in silent resignation? This is rank rebellion! Lvov attempts to draw himself up to his full height and answer the arrogant rebel with dignity. Nothing comes of it. In a weak, trembling voice he mutters the accustomed words, which but lately had invincible power. But they do not produce their customary effect. Their virtue is departed. Whither? Lvov dares not own it even to himself. But it is no longer a secret to any one. Whatever mean and ugly things Ivanov may have done--Tchekhov is not close-fisted in this matter: in his hero's conduct-book are written all manner of offences; almost to the deliberate murder of a woman devoted to him--it is to him and not to Lvov that public opinion bows. Ivanov is the spirit of destruction, rude, violent, pitiless, sticking at nothing: yet the word 'scoundrel,' which the doctor tears out of himself with a painful effort and hurls at him, does not stick to him. He is somehow right, with his own peculiar right, to others inconceivable, yet still, if we may believe Tchekhov, incontestable. Sasha, a creature of youth and insight and talent, passes by the honest Starodoum-Lvov unheeding, on her way to render worship to him. The whole play is based on that. It is true, Ivanov in the end shoots himself, and that may, if you like, give you a formal ground for believing that the final victory remained with Lvov. And Tchekhov did well to end the drama in this way--it could not be spun out to infinity. It would have been no easy matter to tell the whole of Ivanov's history. Tchekhov went on writing for fifteen years after, all the time telling the unfinished story, yet even then he had to break it off without reaching the end....

"Nicolai Stepanich!" she says, growing pale and pressing her hands to her breast. "Nicolai Stepanich! I can't go on like this any longer. For God's sake tell me now, immediately. What shall I do? Tell me, what shall I do?"

"What can I say? I am beaten. I can say nothing."

"But tell me, I implore you," she continues, out of breath and trembling all over her body. "I swear to you, I can't go on like this any longer. I haven't the strength."

She drops into a chair and begins to sob. She throws her head back, wrings her hands, stamps with her feet; her hat falls from her head and dangles by its string, her hair is loosened.

"Help me, help," she implores. "I can't bear it any more."

"There's nothing that I can say to you, Katy," I say.

"Help me," she sobs, seizing my hand and kissing it. "You 're my father, my only friend. You're wise and learned, and you've lived long I You were a teacher. Tell me what to do."

'"Upon my conscience, Katy, I do not know."

'I am bewildered and surprised, stirred by her sobbing, and I can hardly stand upright.

'"Let's have some breakfast, Katy," I say with a constrained smile.

'Instantly I add in a sinking voice: "I shall be dead soon, Katy...."

'"Only one word, only one word," she weeps and stretches out her hands to me. "What shall I do?..."'

But the professor has not the word to give. He turns the conversation to the weather, Kharkov and other indifferent matters. Katy gets up and holds out her hand to him, without looking at him. 'I want to ask her,' he concludes his story. '"So it means you won't be at my funeral?" But she does not look at me; her hand is cold and like a stranger's ... I escort her to the door in silence.... She goes out of my room and walks down the long passage, without looking back. She knows that my eyes are following her, and probably on the landing she will look back. No, she did not look back. The black dress showed for the last time, her steps were stilled.... Good-bye, my treasure!...'

The only answer which the wise, educated, long-lived Nicolai Stepanovich, a teacher all his life, can give to Katy's question is, 'I don't know.' There is not, in all his great experience of the past, a single method, rule, or suggestion, which might apply, even in the smallest degree, to the wild incongruity of the new conditions of Katy's life and his own. Katy can live thus no longer; neither can he himself continue to endure his disgusting and shameful helplessness. They both, old and young, with their whole hearts desire to support each other; they can between them find no way. To her question: 'What shall I do?' he replied: 'I shall soon be dead.' To his 'I shall soon be dead' she answers with wild sobbing, wringing her hands, and absurdly repeating the same words over and over again. It would have been better to have asked no question, not to have begun that frank conversation of souls. But they do not yet understand that. In their old life talk would bring them relief and frank confession, intimacy. But now, after such a meeting they can suffer each other no longer. Katy leaves the old professor, her foster-father, her true father and friend, in the knowledge that he has become a stranger to her. She did not even turn round towards him as she went away. Both felt that nothing remained save to beat their heads against the wall. Therein each acts at his own peril, and there can be no dreaming of a consoling union of souls.

'... Let us talk.... Let us talk of my beautiful life.... What shall I begin with? ... There are such things as fixed ideas, when a person thinks day and night, for instance, of the moon, always of the moon. I too have my moon. Day and night I am at the mercy of one besetting idea: "I must write, I must write, I must." I have hardly finished one story than, for some reason or other, I must write a second, then a third, and after the third, a fourth. I write incessantly, post-haste. I cannot do otherwise. Where then, I ask you, is beauty and serenity? What a monstrous life it is! I am sitting with you now, I am excited, but meanwhile every second I remember that an unfinished story is waiting for me. I see a cloud, like a grand piano. It smells of heliotrope. I say to myself: a sickly smell, a half-mourning colour.... I must not forget to use these words when describing a summer evening. I catch up myself and you on every phrase, on every word, and hurry to lock all these words and phrases into my literary storehouse. Perhaps they will be useful. When I finish work I run to the theatre, or go off fishing: at last I shall rest, forget myself. But no! a heavy ball of iron is dragging on my fetters,--a new subject, which draws me to the desk, and I must make haste to write and write again. And so on for ever, for ever. I have no rest from myself, and I feel that I am eating away my own life. I feel that the honey which I give to others has been made of the pollen of my most precious flowers, that I have plucked the flowers themselves and trampled them down to the roots. Surely, I am mad. Do my neighbours and friends treat me as a sane person? "What are you writing? What have you got ready for us?" The same thing, the same thing eternally, and it seems to me that the attention, the praise, the enthusiasm of my friends is all a fraud. I am being robbed like a sick man, and sometimes I am afraid that they will creep up to me and seize me, and put me away in an asylum.'

THE GIFT OF PROPHECY

To some it may perhaps seem out of place that in an article devoted to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the writer's death, I call to mind his mistakes and errors. The reproach is hardly just. A certain kind of defect in a great man is at least as characteristic and important as his qualities.

I will permit myself to remind the reader of Tolstoi's letter to his son, lately published by the latter in the newspapers. It is very interesting. Once more, not from the standpoint of the practical man who has to decide the questions of the day--from this standpoint Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and their similars are quite useless--but man does not live by bread alone.

Even now in the terrible days through which we have to live, now, if you will, more than ever before, one cannot read newspapers alone, nor think only of the awful surprises which to-morrow prepares for us. To every one is left an hour of leisure between the reading of newspapers and party programmes, if it be not an hour in the day when the noise of events and the pressure of immediate work distracts, then an hour in the deep night, when everything that was possible has been already done, and everything that was required has been said. Then come flying in the old thoughts and questions, frightened away by business, and for the thousandth time one returns to the mystery of human genius and human greatness. Where and how far can genius know and accomplish more than ordinary men?

Then Tolstoi's letter, which during the day aroused only anger and indignation,--is it not outrageous and revolting, think some, that in the great collision of forces which contend with one another in Russia, Tolstoi cannot distinguish the right force from the wrong, but stigmatises all the struggling combatants by the one name of ungodly? During the day, I say, it is surely outrageous: in the daytime we would like Tolstoi to be with us and for us, because we are convinced that we and we alone are seeking the truth,--nay, that we know the truth, while our enemies are defending evil and falsehood, whether in malice or in ignorance. But this is during the day. In the night-time, things are changed. One remembers that Goethe also overlooked, simply did not notice, the great French Revolution. True, he was a German who lived far from Paris, while Tolstoi lives close to Moscow, where men, women, and children have been shot, cut down, and burnt alive. Moreover, there is no doubt that Tolstoi has overlooked not merely Moscow, but everything that went before Moscow. What is happening now does not seem to him important or extraordinary. For him only that is important to which he, Tolstoi, has set his hand: all that occurs outside and beside him, for him has no existence. This is the great prerogative of great men. And sometimes it seems to me--perhaps it is only that I would have it seem so--as though there were in that prerogative a deep and hidden meaning.

When we have no more strength in us to listen to the endless tales of horrible atrocities which have already been committed, and to anticipate in imagination all that the future holds in store for us, then we recall Tolstoi and his indifference. It is not in our human power to return the murdered fathers and mothers to the children nor the children to their fathers and mothers. Nor stands it even in our power to revenge ourselves upon the murderers, nor will vengeance reconcile every one to his loss. And we try no longer to think with logic, and to seek a justification of the horrors there where there is and can be none. What if we ask ourselves whether Tolstoi and Goethe did not sec the Revolution and did not suffer its pain, only because they saw something else, something, it may even be, more necessary and important? Maybe there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

Now we may return to Dostoevsky and his 'ideas'; we may call them fearlessly by the names which they deserve, for though Dostoevsky is a writer of genius, this does not mean that we must forget our daily needs. The night and the day have each their rights. Dostoevsky wanted to be a prophet, he wanted people to listen to him and cry 'Hosanna!' because, I say again, he thought that if men had ever cried 'Hosanna!' to any one, then there was no reason why he, Dostoevsky, should be denied the honour. That is the reason why in the 'seventies he made his appearance in the new r?le of a preacher of Christianity, and not of Christianity merely, but of orthodoxy.

However strange it may appear, it must be confessed that one cannot find in the whole of literature a single man who is prepared to accept the Gospel as a whole, without interpretation. One man wants to seize Constantinople according to the Gospel, another to justify the existing order, a third to exalt himself or to thrust down his enemy; and each considers it as his right to diminish from, or even to supplement, the text of Holy Writ. I have, of course, only those in view who acknowledge, at least in word, the divine origin of the New Testament; since he who sees in the Gospel only one of the more or less remarkable books of his library, naturally has the right to subject it to whatever critical operations he may choose.

But here we have Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Soloviev. It is generally believed, and the belief is particularly supported and developed by the most recent criticism, that Tolstoi alone rationalised Christianity, while Dostoevsky and Soloviev accepted it in all the fullness of its mysticism, denying reason the right to separate truth from falsehood in the Gospel. I consider this belief mistaken: for Dostoevsky and Soloviev were afraid to accept the Gospel as the fountain of knowledge, and relied much more upon their own reason and their experience of life than upon the words of Christ. But, if there was a man among us who, though but in part, took the risk of accepting the mysterious and obviously dangerous words of the Gospel precepts, that man was Leo Tolstoi. I will explain myself.

But there is no great harm done even if he did prophesy. I am glad with all my heart even now that he rested a little while from the galleys at the end of his life. I am deeply convinced that even had he remained in the underworld until the day of his death, yet he would have found no solution of the questions which tormented him. However much energy of soul a man puts into his work, he will still remain 'on the eve' of truth, and will not find the solution he desires. That is the law of human kind. And Dostoevsky's preaching has done no harm. Those listened to him who, even without his voice, would have marched on Constantinople, oppressed the Poles, and made ready the sufferings which are necessary to the soul of the peasant. Though Dostoevsky gave them his sanction, on the whole he adds nothing to them. They had no need of literary sanction, quite correctly judging that in practical matters not the printed page, but bayonets and artillery are of deciding value.

All that he had to tell, Dostoevsky told us in his novels, which even now, twenty-five years after his death, attract all those who would wrest from life her secrets. And the title of prophet, which he sought so diligently, considering that it was his by right, did not suit him at all. Prophets are Bismarcks, but they are Chancellors too. The first in the village is the first in Rome.... Is a Dostoevsky doomed eternally to be 'on the eve'? Let us once more try to reject logic, this time perhaps not logic alone, and say: 'So let it be.'

PENULTIMATE WORDS

We have wireless telegraphy, radium and the rest, yet we stand no higher than the Romans or the Greeks of old. You admit this? Then, one step further: although we have wireless telegraphy and all the other blessings of civilisation, still we stand no higher than red-or black-skinned savages. You protest: but the principle compels. You began to doubt: then what is the use of drawing back?

For myself, I must confess that the idea of the spiritual perfection of savages entered my mind but lately, when, for the first time for many years, I looked through the works of Tylor, Lubbock and Spencer. They speak with such certainty of the advantages of our spiritual organisation, and have such sincere contempt for the moral misery of the savage, that in spite of myself stole in the thought: Is it not exactly here, where all are so certain that no one ever examines the question, that the source of error is to be found? High time to recall Descartes and his rule! And as soon as I began to doubt, all my former certainty--of course I fully shared the opinion of the English anthropologists--disappeared in a moment.... It began to appear that the savage indeed is higher and more important than our savants, and not our materialists only, as Professor Paulsen thinks, but our idealists, metaphysicians, mystics, and even our convinced missionaries , whom Europe sends forth into the world to enlighten the backward brethren. It seemed to me that the credit transactions common among savages, with a promise to pay in the world beyond the grave, have a deep meaning. And human sacrifices! In them Spencer sees a barbarity, as an educated European should. I also see in them barbarity, because I also am a European and have a scientific education. But I deeply envy their barbarity, and curse the cultivation which has herded me together with believing missionaries, idealist, materialist, and positivist philosophers, into the narrow fold of the sultry and disgusting apprehensible world. We may write books to prove the immortality of the soul, but our wives won't follow us to the other world: they will prefer to endure the widow's lot here on the earth. Our morality, based on religion, forbids us to hurry into eternity. And so in everything. We are guessing, at the best we are sicklied with dreams, but our life passes outside our guesses and our dreams. One man still accepts the rites of the Church, however strange they may be, and seriously imagines that he is brought into contact with other worlds. Beyond the rites no step is taken. Kant died when he was eighty; had it not been for cholera, Hegel would have lived a hundred years; while the savages--the young ones kill the old and ... I dare not complete the sentence for fear of offending sensitive ears. Again I recall Descartes and his rule: who is right, the savages or we? And if the savages are right, can history be the unfolding of the idea? And is not the conception of progress in time the purest error? Perhaps, and most probably, there is development, but the direction of this development is in a line perpendicular to the line of time. The base of the perpendicular may be any human personality. May God and the reader forgive one the obscurity of the last words. I hope the clarity of the foregoing exposition will to some extent atone for it.

We are obliged to think that nothing certain can be said either of self-renunciation or of megalomania, though each one of us in his own experience knows something of the former as well as of the latter. But it is well known that the impossibility of solving a question never yet kept people from reflecting. On the contrary: to us the most alluring questions are those to which there is no actual, no universally valid, answer. I hope that sooner or later, philosophy will be thus defined, in contrast to science:--philosophy is the teaching of truths which are binding on none. Thereby the accusation so often made against philosophy will be removed, that philosophy properly consists of a series of mutually exclusive opinions. This is true, but she must be praised for it, not blamed: there is nothing bad in it, but good, a very great deal of good. On the other hand, it is bad, extremely bad, that science should consist of truths universally binding. For every obligation is a constraint. Temporarily, one can submit to a restraint, put on a corset, fetters; one can agree to anything temporarily. Rut who will voluntarily admit the mastery over himself of an eternal law? Even from the quiet and clear Spinoza I sometimes hear a deep sigh, and I think that he is longing for freedom--he who wasted all his life, all his genius in the glorification of necessity.... With such an introduction one may say what he pleases.

It seems to me that self-renunciation and megalomania, however little they resemble one another apparently, may be observed successively, even simultaneously, in one and the same person. The ascetic, who has denied life and humbles himself before everybody, and the madman , who affirms that he is the light, the salt of the earth, the first in the whole world or even in the whole universe--both reach their madness--I hope there is no necessity to demonstrate that self-renunciation as well as megalomania is a kind of madness--under conditions for the most part identical. The world does not satisfy the man and he begins to seek for a better. All serious seeking brings a man to lonely paths, and lonely paths, it is well known, end in a great wall which sets a fatal bound to man's curiosity. Then arises the question, how shall a man pass beyond the wall, by overcoming either the law of impenetrability or the equally invincible law of gravity, in other words, how shall a man become infinitely small or infinitely great? The first way is that of self-renunciation: I want nothing, I myself am nothing, I am infinitely small, and therefore I can pass through the infinitely small pores of the wall.

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