Levin’s Epiphany

In 2023, my maternal grandmother died. I read part of this passage at her funeral.

Thucydides, the great Athenian historian of the fifth century BC, wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War (1.22) that:

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

καὶ ἐς μὲν ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον φανεῖται: ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν αὐτὰ ἀρκούντως ἕξει. κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν ξύγκειται.

Thucydides was, of course, successful: he did produce a κτῆμά ἐς αἰεὶ, a possession for all time. What’s more, I came across the passage in J.N. Figgis’s Gerson to Grotius, a book that remains valuable more than a hundred years after it was first published. The longevity of these pieces is striking: I doubt that anyone will be reading my writing a century from now, let alone two millennia.

Thucydides’ dichotomy provides a counterpoint, I think, to concerns that LLMs will replace human thought leaders. Trained on all the fortune-cookie wisdom that has ever been thrown out onto the internet, language models can produce genuinely perceptive ideas; because their training data is meaningful, and in any case most of our ideas are discursively produced, they can produce aphorisms no less well than your average Twitter influencer. But as ‘new’ wisdom becomes more available, whether generated by a language model or a Twitter influencer, we will find more value in older writing.

C.S. Lewis once wrote an introduction to an edition of St. Athanasius’s De Incarnatione; an introduction which he entitled ‘On the Reading of Old Books’. He argues powerfully not merely that historical scholarship is valuable, but that it is useful for all of us to study ancient ideologies, controversies, and theories directly.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.

I think he’s probably right about this! It’s important to look for one’s '“characteristic blindness”, and old books are a great way to find it.

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In that vein, I want to share an excerpt from Anna Karenina. I really enjoyed having read Anna Karenina: although it’s a significant time commitment, it’s got fantastic passages. One in particular resonated with me, where Tolstoy describes the intellectual journey of his avatar, Levin, as he deals with his loss of Christian faith. Levin tries to find meaning in philosophy, but in vain; and eventually, he rediscovers the wisdom of his ancestors. It’s a fairly long excerpt - but before I get into it, I also want to share a beautiful line from Book III, Chapter V, which describes the state of flow that Levin experiences while working in the fields. I really think this is something to aspire to in our work.

The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished of its own accord. These were blessed moments.

Anyway, here’s the excerpt - I have only omitted a few short sections.=

Chapter 8

SINCE the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is. Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development—the terms that had superseded these beliefs—were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably.

From that moment, without thinking about it and though he continued living as he had done heretofore, Levin never ceased to feel afraid of his ignorance.

Moreover, he was vaguely conscious that what he had called his convictions were really ignorance and, more than that, were a state of mind which rendered knowledge of what he needed impossible.

At the commencement of his married life the new joys and new duties he experienced completely stifled these thoughts; but lately, since his wife's confinement, while living in Moscow without any occupation, the problem demanding solution had presented itself more and more insistently to him.

For him the problem was this: ‘If I don't accept the replies offered by Christianity to the questions my life presents, what solutions do I accept?' And he not only failed to find in the whole arsenal of his convictions any kind of answer, but he could not even find anything resembling an answer.

He was in the position of a man seeking for food in a toyshop or at a gunsmith's.

Involuntarily and unconsciously, in every book, in every conversation, and in every person he met, he now sought for their relation to those questions and for a solution to them.

What astounded and upset him most in this connection, was that the majority of those in his set and of his age, having like himself replaced their former beliefs by new convictions like his own, did not see anything to be distressed about, and were quite contented and tranquil. So that, besides the principal question, Levin was tormented by other questions: Were these people sincere? Were they not pretending? Or did they understand, possibly in some different and clearer way than he, the answers science gives to the questions he was concerned with? And he studied painstakingly both the opinions of those people and the books which contained their answers.
One thing he had discovered since these questions had begun to occupy him, namely, that he had been mistaken in imagining from his recollections of his youthful university circle, that religion had outlived its day and no longer existed. All those near to him who lived good lives were people who believed: the old Prince, Lvov, of whom he had grown so fond, his brother, Koznyshev, and all the womenfolk. His wife believed as he had done in early childhood, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of the Russian people, the whole of the people whose lives he most respected, also believed. Another thing was that, having read a great many books, he became convinced that those who shared his outlook understood only what he had understood, explaining nothing and merely ignoring those problems— without a solution to which he felt he could not live,—but trying to solve quite other problems which could not interest him, such as, for instance, the development of organisms, a mechanical explanation of the soul, and so on.

Besides, during the time of his wife's confinement an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He, an unbeliever, began to pray, and while praying believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not allot any place in his life to the state of mind he had then experienced.

He could not admit that he had then known the truth and was now making a mistake; because, as soon as he reflected calmly about it, it all fell to pieces; nor could he acknowledge that he had then been mistaken, for he prized the state his soul had then been in, and by acknowledging it to be a result of weakness he would have defiled those moments. He was painfully out of harmony with himself and strained all his spiritual powers to escape from this condition.

Chapter 9

These thoughts oppressed and tormented him, now more and now less strongly, but never left him. He read and thought, and the more he read and thought the further he felt from his goal.

Latterly in Moscow and in the country, having convinced himself that he could get no answer from the materialists, he read through and re-read Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schilling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, those philosophers who explained life otherwise than materialistically.

Their thoughts seemed to him fruitful when he read, or was himself devising refutations of other teachings, the materialistic in particular; but as soon as he began reading, or himself devised, solutions to life's problems, the same thing occurred every time. Following long definitions of vague words such as spirit, will, freedom, substance, and deliberately entering the verbal trap set for him by the philosophers, or by himself, he seemed to begin to understand something. But he had only to forget that artificial line of thought, and to return direct from real life to what had appeared satisfactory so long as he kept to the given line of thought—and suddenly the whole artificial edifice tumbled down like a house of cards, and it was evident that the edifice had been constructed of those same words differently arranged, and without regard for something in life more important than reason.

At one time, while reading Schopenhauer, he replaced the word will by the word love, and this new philosophy comforted him for a day or two, as long as he did not stand aside from it; but it, too, collapsed when he viewed it in relation to real life, and it turned out to be a muslin garment without warmth.

His brother Koznyshev advised him to read Homyakov's* theological writings. Levin read the second volume of them, and, in spite of its polemical, polished, and witty style, which at first repelled him, he was struck by its teaching about the Church. He was struck by the thought that it is not given to isolated man to attain divine truth, but that it is given to a community united by love—the Church. He was pleased by the thought that it was easier to believe in an existing living Church which compounds all the beliefs of men, and has God at its head and is therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept belief in God, a distant, mysterious God, the Creation, and so on. But afterwards on reading the history of the Church, first by a Roman Catholic and then by a Greek-Orthodox writer, and finding that each essentially infallible Church repudiated the other, he became disenchanted with Homyakov's teaching about the Church; and that edifice fell into dustjust asthe philosophical structureshad done.

All that spring he was not himself and experienced terrible moments.

'Without knowing what I am, and why I am here, it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I can't live,' he said to himself.

'In an infinity of time, and in infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble, a bubble organism, separates itself, and that bubble maintains itself awhile and then bursts, and that bubble is—I!'

This was a distressing falsehood, but it was the sole and last result of centuries and the age-long labour of human thought in that direction.

It was the latest belief. It was the ruling conviction, and from among all other explanations Levin, without himself knowing when or how, had involuntarily chosen it as being at any rate the clearest of all.

But it was not only false, it was the cruel mockery of some evil power: a wicked and disgusting Power, and one to which it was impossible to submit.

It was necessary to free oneself from that Power. The means of escape were in the hands of every man. An end had to be put to that dependence on an evil power; and there was one means—death.

And though he was a happy and healthy family man, Levin was several times so near to suicide that he hid a cord he had lest he should hang himself, and he feared to carry a gun lest he should shoot himself.

But he did not hang or shoot himself and went on living.

Chapter 10

WHEN Levin thought about what he was and why he lived, he could find no answer and was driven to despair; but when he left off asking himself those questions, he seemed to know what he was and why he lived, for he acted and lived unfalteringly and definitely—recently even more unfalteringly than before.

When he returned to the country in June, he went back to his ordinary occupations—husbandry, intercourse with the peasants and with his neighbours, management of his house and of his sister's and brother's affairs, which were entrusted to him, relations with his wife and relatives, cares about his baby, and a new hobby—beekeeping, which he took up with enthusiasm that spring—occupied all his time.

These matters interested him, not because he justified them to himself by any general theories as he had done previously; on the contrary, being now on the one hand disenchanted by the ill-success of his former occupations for the general welfare, and on the other hand too much occupied with his own thoughts and by the mass of affairs that overwhelmed him from all sides, he quite abandoned all calculation of public utility, and these matters interested him only because it seemed to him that he had to do what he was doing, and could not act otherwise.

…

Whether he was acting well or ill he did not know, and far from laying down the law about it, he now avoided talking or thinking about it. Thinking about it led him into doubts and prevented him from seeing what he should and should not do. But when he did not think, but just lived, he unceasingly felt in his soul the presence of an infallible judge deciding which of two possible actions was the better and which the worse; and as soon as he did what he should not have done, he immediately felt this.

In this way he lived, not knowing or seeing any possibility of knowing what he was or why he lived in the world, and he suffered so much from that ignorance that he was afraid he might commit suicide, while at the same time he was firmly cutting his own particular definite path through life.

Chapter 11

THE day when Koznyshev arrived at Pokrovsk was one of Levin's most distressing days.

It was the most pressingly busy season of the year, when an extraordinary tension of self-sacrificing labour manifests itself among all the peasants, such as is never shown in any other condition of life, and such as would be highly esteemed if the people who exhibit this quality esteemed it themselves, if it were not repeated every year, and if the results of that tension were not so simple.

To mow or reap the rye and oats, and cart them, to finish mowing the meadows, to re-plough the fallow land, to thresh the seed corn and sow the winter rye—all this seems simple and ordinary; yet to get it all done, it is necessary that all the peasants, from the oldest to the youngest, should work unceasingly those three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on kvas, onions, and black bread, threshing and carting the sheaves by night and sleeping not more than two or three hours out of the twenty-four. And this is done every year, all over Russia.

Having lived most of his life in the country and in close contact with the peasants, Levin always felt, at this busy time, that this general stimulation of the peasants communicated itself to him.

Early in the morning he rode to where the first rye was being sown, then to see the oats carted and stacked, and returning home when his wife and sister-in-law were getting up he drank coffee with them, and then walked to the farm where the new threshing machine was to be started to thresh the seed corn.

All that day, when talking to the steward and the peasants and at home with his wife, Dolly, her children, and his father-in-law, Levin's thoughts were busy with the one and only subject, outside his farming, that interested him at this time, and in everything he sought its relation to his questions: 'What am I? Where am I? And why am I here?'

…

Having worked till the peasants' dinner-hour, which soon came, he left the barn together with Theodore and began chatting, standing beside the neat yellow freshly-reaped stack of seed-rye on the threshing-floor. 

Theodore came from the farther village, the one where Levin had formerly let the land to be worked co-operatively. At present it was let to the innkeeper.

Levin got into conversation with Theodore about that land, and asked whether Plato, a well-to-do and worthy peasant of that village, would not rent that land next year.

'The rent is too high, Constantine Dmitrich,' answered Theodore, picking out the ears of rye from the front of his damp shirt.

'But how does Kirilov make it pay?'

'Why shouldn't Mityuka' (as he contemptuously called the innkeeper) 'make it pay, Constantine Dmitrich? That fellow will press hard, but he'll get his own! He will have no pity on a Christian! But as if Daddy Plato would ever skin a man! He'll lend, and sometimes he'll let a man off, and so run short himself. It all depends on the sort of man.’

'But why should he let anyone off?'

'Oh well, you see, people differ! One man lives only for his own needs: take Mityuka, who only stuffs his own belly, but Plato is an upright old man. He lives for his soul and remembers God.'

'How does he remember God? How does he live for the soul?' Levin almost cried out.

'You know how: rightly, in a godly way. You know, people differ! Take you, for instance,you won't injure anyone either...'

'Yes, yes! Good-bye!' uttered Levin, gasping with excitement, and turning away, he took his stick and walked quickly away toward home. At the peasant's words about Plato living for his soul, rightly, in a godly way, dim but important thoughts crowded into his mind, as if breaking loose from some place where they had been locked up, and all rushing toward one goal, whirled in his head, dazzling him with their light.

Chapter 12

LEVIN went along the high-road with long strides, attending not so much to his thoughts—he could not yet disentangle them—as to a condition of his soul he had never before experienced.

The words the peasant had spoken produced in his soul the effect of an electric spark, suddenly transforming and welding into one a whole group of disjointed impotent separate ideas which had always interested him. These ideas, though he had been unconscious of them, had been in his mind when he was talking about letting the land.

He felt something new in his soul and probed this something with pleasure, not yet knowing what it was.

'To live not for one's needs but for God! For what God? What could be more senseless than what he said? He said we must not live for our needs—that is, we must not live for what we understand and what attracts us, what we wish for, but must live for something incomprehensible, for God whom nobody can understand or define. Well? And did I not understand those senseless words of Theodore's? And having understood them, did I doubt their justice? Did I find them stupid, vague, or inexact?

'No, I understand him just as he understands them: understood completely and more clearly than I understand anything in life; and I have never in my life doubted it, and cannot doubt it. And not I alone but every one—the whole world—only understands that completely. Nobody is free from doubt about other things, but nobody ever doubts this one thing, everybody always agrees with it.

'And I sought for miracles, regretted not to see a miracle that might convince me! A physical miracle would have tempted me. But here is a miracle, the one possible, everlasting miracle, all around me, and I did not notice it!

'Theodore says that Kirilov, the innkeeper, lives for his belly. That is intelligible and reasonable. We all, as reasoning creatures, cannot live otherwise. And then that same Theodore says that it is wrong to live for one’s belly, and that we must live for Truth, for God, and at the first hint I understand him! I and millions of men who lived centuries ago and those who are living now: peasants, the poor in spirit, and sages, who have thought and written about it, saying the same thing in their obscure words—we all agree on that one thing: what we should live for, and what is good. I, and all other men, know only one thing firmly, clearly, and certainly, and this knowledge cannot be explained by reason: it is outside reason, has no cause, and can have no consequences.

'If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence—a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect.

'It is exactly this that I know and that we all know.

'What greater miracle could there be than that?

'Can I possibly have found the solution of everything? Have my sufferings really come to an end?' thought Levin as he strode along the dusty road, oblivious of the heat, of his fatigue, and filled with a sense of relief from long-continued suffering. That feeling was so joyous that it seemed questionable to him. He was breathless with excitement and, incapable of going further, he turned from the road into the wood and sat down on the uncut grass in the shade of the aspens. Taking the hat from his perspiring head, he lay down, leaning his elbow upon the juicy, broad-bladed forest grass.

'Yes, I must clear it up and understand it,' he thought, gazing intently at the untrodden grass before him, and following the movements of a green insect that was crawling up a stalk of couch grass and was hindered in its ascent by a leaf of goutwort. 'What have I discovered?' he asked himself, turning back the leaf that it should not hinder the insect and bending another blade for the creature to pass on to. 'What gladdens me? What have I discovered?

‘I have discovered nothing. I have only perceived what it is that I know. I have understood the Power that not only gave me life in the past but is giving me life now. I have freed myself from deception and learnt to know my Master.

'I used to say that in my body, in this grass, in this insect... (There! It did not want to get on to that grass, but has spread its wings and flown away) there takes place, according to physical, chemical, and physiological laws, a change of matter. And in all of us, including the aspens and the clouds and nebulae, evolution is proceeding. Evolution from what, into what? Unending evolution and struggle.

As if there could be any direction and struggle in infinity! And I was surprised that, in spite of the greatest effort of thought on that path, the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses and my aspirations, was not revealed to me. But now I say that I know the meaning of my life: it is to live for God, for the soul. And that meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mystic and wonderful. And such is the meaning of all existence. Ah yes! Pride!' he said to himself, turning over face downwards and beginning to tie blades of grass into knots, trying not to break them.

'And not only mental pride but mental stupidity. And chiefly roguery of mind, precisely roguery. Just mind-swindling,’ he repeated.

He briefly reviewed the whole course of his thoughts during the last two years, beginning with the clear and obvious thought of death at the sight of his beloved brother hopelessly ill.

Having then for the first time clearly understood that before every man, and before himself, there lay only suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he had concluded that to live under such conditions was impossible; that one must either explain life to oneself so that it does not seem to be an evil mockery by some sort of devil, or one must shoot oneself.

But he had done neither the one nor the other, yet he continued to live, think, and feel, had even at that very time got married, experienced many joys, and been happy whenever he was not thinking of the meaning of his life.

What did that show? It showed that he had lived well, but thought badly.

He had lived (without being conscious of it) by those spiritual truths which he had imbibed with his mother's milk; but in thought he had not only not acknowledged those truths, but had studiously evaded them.

Now it was clear to him that he was only able to live, thanks to the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

'What should I have been and how should I have lived my life, if I had not had those beliefs, and had not known that one must live for God, and not for one's own needs? I should have robbed, lied, and murdered. Nothing of that which constitutes the chief joys of my life would have existed for me.' And although he made the greatest efforts of imagination, he could not picture to himself the bestial creature he would have been, had he not known what he was living for.

'I looked for an answer to my question. But reason could not give me an answer—reason is incommensurable with the question. Life itself has given me the answer, in my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And that knowledge I did not acquire in any way; it was given to me as to everybody, given because I could not take it from anywhere.

'Where did I get it from? Was it by reason that I attained to the knowledge that I must love my neighbour and not throttle him? They told me so when I was a child, and I gladly believed it, because they told me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason! Reason has discovered the struggle for existence and the law that I must throttle all those who hinder the satisfaction of my desires. That is the deduction reason makes. But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.'

Chapter 13

LEVIN remembered a recent scene between Dolly and her children. Left by themselves, the children had started cooking raspberries over a candle, and pouring jets of milk into their mouths. When their mother caught them at this pursuit, she began in Levin's presence to impress on them how much trouble what they were wasting had cost grown-up people, that that trouble had been taken for them, that if they broke cups they would not have anything to drink tea out of, and if they spilt milk they would not have anything to eat and would die of hunger.

And Levin was struck by the quiet dull disbelief with which the children listened to these remarks from their mother. They were only grieved that their amusing game had been ended, and they did not believe a word of what she was saying. And they could not believe it, because they could not imagine the whole volume of all they consumed, and therefore could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived on.

'That's quite a different matter,’ they thought. 'And not in the least interesting or important, because those things always have been and always will be. It is always the same thing over and over again. There is no need for us to think about that, it's all ready for us; but we want to think out something of our own invention and new. Now we've thought of putting raspberries in a cup and cooking them over a candle, and of pouring milk into each other's mouths like fountains. That is amusing and new, and not at all worse than drinking out of cups/

'Don't we, and didn't I, do just the same, when intellectually I sought for the meaning of the forces of nature and the purpose of human life?' he went on thinking.

'And don't all the philosophic theories do the same, when by ways of thought strange and unnatural to man they lead him to a knowledge of what he knew long ago, and knows so surely that without it he could not live? Is it not evident in the development of every philosopher's theory that he knows in advance, as indubitably as the peasant Theodore and not a whit more clearly than he, the chief meaning of life, and only wishes, by a questionable intellectual process, to return to what every one knows?

'Supposing now that the children were left alone to procure or make cups for themselves and to milk the cows and so on. Would they play tricks? No, they would die of hunger! Suppose we, with our passions and thoughts, were left without the conception of God, a Creator, and without a conception of what is good, and without an explanation of moral evil!

'Try to build up anything without these conceptions!

'We destroy because we have our fill spiritually. We are children indeed!

*Whence comes the joyful knowledge I have in common with the peasant, and which alone gives me peace of mind? Where did I get it?

'I, educated in the conception of God, as a Christian, having filled my life with the spiritual blessings Christianity gave me, brimful of these blessings and living by them, I, like a child, not understanding them, destroy them—that is, I wish to destroy that by which I live. But as soon as an important moment of life comes, like children when they are cold and hungry, I go to Him, and even less than the children whose mother scolds them for their childish mischief do I feel that my childish attempts to kick because I am filled should be reckoned against me.

'Yes, what I know, I know not by my reason but because it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it in my heart by faith in the chief thing which the Church proclaims.

'The Church? The Church?' Levin repeated to himself. He turned over, and leaning on his elbows began looking at a herd of cattle in the distance approaching the river on the other side.

'But can I believe in all that the Church professes?' he asked himself, testing himself by everything which might destroy his present peace of mind. He purposely thought of those teachings of the Church which always seemed most strange to him, and that tried him. 'The Creation.—-But how do I account for existence?By existence! By nothing!—The devil and sin?—And how do I explain evil?... A Saviour?...

'But I know nothing, nothing! And can know nothing but what is told me and to everybody/

And it now seemed to him that there was not one of the dogmas of the Church which could disturb the principal thing—faith in God, in goodness, as the sole vocation of man.

Each of the Church's doctrines might be represented by faith in serving truth rather than serving one's personal needs. And each of them not only did not infringe that belief but was necessary for the fulfilment of the chief miracle ever recurring on earth: the possibility of every one, millions of most diverse people, sages and idiots, children and old men, peasants, Lvov, Kitty, beggars and kings, indubitably understanding one and the same thing, and forming that life of the spirit which alone is worth living for and which alone we prize.

Lying on his back he was now gazing at the high cloudless sky. 'Don't I know that that is infinite space, and not a rounded vault? But however I may screw my eyes and strain my sight, I cannot help seeing it round and limited, and despite my knowledge of it as limitless space I am indubitably right when I see a firm blue vault, and more right than when I strain to see beyond it.'

Levin ceased to think, and only as it were hearkened to mystic voices that seemed to be joyously and earnestly discussing something.

'Can this really be faith?' he wondered, afraid to believe in his happiness. 'My God, I thank Thee!' he uttered, repressing his rising sobs, and wiping away with both hands the tears that filled his eyes.