41) A rational conviction can never be com-plete. A full conviction can only be irrational, es-pecially with women.
42 ) Answer good for evil and you destroy in an evil man all pleasure which he receives from evil.
43 ) God is love. We know God only in love, which unites everything. You know God in your-self through the striving towards this union.
44) One continually thinks that the good will be good for him. But the good is, or it is not it is not something that will be.
45) The important thing lies in thoughts. Thoughts are the beginning of everything. And thoughts can be directed. And therefore the principal task of perfection is to work on thoughts.
June 27. If I live. Y.P.
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To-day July 4th. Y. P.
All this time I have been ill with my usual stomach sickness. The work which absorbed me very much, has stopped.
Christ as a myth; 384 and Kenworthy’s book, a rational exposition of the life of Christ. The first is better. There is need of a philosophy of moral economy, i.e., of religious truth. There is such a thing.
I have had many good thoughts, being ill and nearing death. I think often with pain of brother S.
I have noted down the 4th :
1 ) The government destroys faith, but faith is necessary. Some violating themselves believe in the miraculous, in the absurd; others in science. But in which? In the contemporary. But in the contemporary, there is 99/100 of lie and error. In every contemporary science there are lies. Truth revealed by God is of course the right, it is religion; and truth obtained by the reason of man, by science, is also of course, the right. But the matter lies in recognising what is discovered by God and what has been gained by human reason.
2) Death is the destruction of those organs by means of which I perceive the world as it appears in this life; it is the destruction of that glass through which I looked and a change to another.
3) Educated people using their education not
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for the enlightenment and freeing of the working-classes, but for befogging them, are like workers using their strength not for sustaining life but for destroying it. These are the intellectual Puga-chevs, Stenka Razins, only a thousand times more dangerous. July 5. Y. P. If I live.
To-day September 28. Y. P.
Have worked all the time on Resurrection; now I have stumbled on the third part. It is long since I have made no progress.
… I have wrought for myself a calm which is not to be disturbed: not to speak and to know that this is necessary; that it is under these condi-tions one ought to live.
There are here Ilya, Sonya 385 with the children, Andrusha with his wife, Masha with her hus-band.
I am thinking more and more often about the philosophic definition of space and time. To-day, if I have time, I am going to write it out.
I read an interesting book about Christ never having been, that it was a myth. 386 The proba-bilities that it is right there are as many for it, as there are against.
Yesterday with the help of Masha I answered all the letters; many remained unanswered. I am still ill; rarely a day without pain. I am dissatis-
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fied with myself, also morally. I have let myself go very much I do not work physically and I am occupied with myself, with my health. How difficult it is to bear sickness resignedly, to go unto death without resistance and one must. I have been thinking during this time :
1 ) Women demanding for themselves the work of man and the same freedom, mostly demand for themselves unconsciously the freedom for licence, and as a result go down much lower than the family, though aiming to stand higher than it.
2) What is this memory which makes from me one being, from childhood unto death? What is this faculty connecting separate beings in time, into one? One ought to ask not what is it that unites, but what divides, these beings. The faculty of time divides, beyond which I cannot see myself. I am one indivisible being from birth un-til death; but to manifest and to know myself, I must do so in time. I am now such as I was and will be; but one who had to and even will manifest myself and know myself in time. I have to manifest myself and know myself in time for communion with other beings and for influencing them.
3) I plucked a flower and threw it away. There were so many of them, it was no pity. We do not value these inimitable beauties of living be-ings and destroy them, having no pity not only for
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plants, but for animals, human people. There are so many of them. Culture, civilisation, is nothing else than the ruin of these beauties and the re-placing them . . . with what? The saloon, the theatre . . .
4) They reproach you with malice, debauchery, lies, thefts, bring proof, etc. What is to be done? Answer the question with What time is it? Are you going to take a swim? Have you seen N N, etc. That is the best and only means of bearing these accusations and even clearing them up.
5 ) The dearest thing on earth is the good rela-tion between people; but the establishment of these relations is not the result of conversation on the contrary, they become spoiled by conversation. Speak as little as possible, and especially with those people with whom you want to be in good rela-tion.
6) In eating, I destroy the limits between my-self and other beings; creating children, I do al-most the same thing. The results of the destruc-tion of material limits are visible; the results of the destruction of the spiritual limits and the union re-sulting from this are invisible, only because they are broader.
7) “ People are divided (divided from other beings), and this appears to them as space. The fact that they are inseparable in essence appears to them as time.” That is the way I have noted
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it. Space divides, time unites. But this is un-true. Both time and space are dividers and they form the impossibility of realising unity. (Unclear, but I understand. I will make it clear later.)
8) Brotherhood is natural, proper to people. Non-brotherhood, divisions, are carefully nur-tured.
9) Sometimes one feels like complaining child-ishly to some one (to God), to beg for help. Is this feeling good ? It is not good : it is a weakness, a lack of faith. That which more than anything resembles faith the beseeching prayer, is in truth a lack of faith a lack of faith that there is no evil, that there is nothing to ask for, that if things are going badly with you, then it only dem-onstrates that you ought to improve yourself, and that there is going on, that very thing which ought to be, and under which you ought to do that which has to be done.
10) Just now I wrote this coldly, understand-ing with difficulty that state in which you wish to live for God alone, and I see through this how there are people who absolutely never understand this, not knowing any other kind of life besides the worldly, for people. I know this state, but can-not just now call it up in myself, but only remem-ber it.
n) Everything which lives without conscious-280
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ness, as I live when I sleep, as I lived in the womb of my mother, lives not materially, i.e., not know-ing matter, but lives. But life is something spiritual. Endeavouring to remember my state before consciousness, on the threshold of con-sciousness, I know only the feeling of depression, satisfaction, pleasure, suffering, but there is no conception of my body or of another’s. The con-ception of body (matter) manifests itself only when consciousness is manifested. The conception of body manifests itself only, because conscious-ness gives understanding of the presence in one’s self of the basis of everything (spiritual). And at the same time, as I know that I am the basis of everything, I know also that I am not the whole basis, but a part of it. And it is this being a part of a whole, these limits separating me from the whole, I know through my body : through my own body and the bodies surrounding me.
12) If you desire something, if you are afraid of something, that means that you do not believe in that God of love which is in you. If you had believed in Him, then you could not have wanted anything or have been afraid, because all desires of that God which lives in you are being always fulfilled, because God is all-powerful; and you would never have been afraid, because for God there is nothing terrible.
13) Not to think that you know in what the
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will of God really lies, but to be humble; and then you will be loving. And the will of God in rela-tion to you, lies only in this.
14) People convincing others that reason can-not be the guide of life are those in whom reason is so perverted, that they clearly see that they have been led into a swamp.
15) The only instance where a man can and ought
