Anna Karenina

hese 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
re-read 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 for 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 anyway 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.