Oct. 27. Y. P.
We are living alone: . . . Olga, 389 Andrusha, Julie 390 and Andrei Dmitrievich. 391 Everything is all right, but I am often indisposed: there are more ill days than healthy ones and therefore I write little. Sent off 19 chapters, 392 very much unfinished. I am working on the end. I have thought much, and perhaps well: i) About the freedom of the will, simply: Man is free in everything spiritual, in love: he can love or not love, more and less. In every-thing remaining he is not free, consequently in everything material. Man can direct and not di-rect his strength towards the service of God. In
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this one thing (but it is an enormous thing), he is free : he can pull or be driven.
2) … of the workers, prostitution and many other things, all this is a necessary, inevitable con-sequence and condition of the pagan order of life in which we live, and to change either one or many of these, is impossible. What is to be done? Change the very order of this life, that on which it stands. How? By this, in the first place, by not taking part in this order, in that which sup-ports it … etc. And, second, to do that in which man alone is absolutely free : to change self-ishness in his soul and everything which flows from it: malice, greed, violence, and everything else by love and by all that which flows from it: reason-ableness, humility, kindness and the rest. It is impossible to turn back the wheel of a machine by force, they are all bound together with cogs and other wheels but to let the steam go which will move them or not let it go is easy; thus it is terribly difficult to change the very outer con-ditions of life, but to be good or bad is easy. But this being good or evil changes all the outer con-ditions of life.
3) Our life is the freeing of the enclosed the expansion of the limits in which the illimitable principle acts. This expansion of the limits ap-pears to us as matter in motion. The limit of ex-pansion in space appears to us as matter. That
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part of matter which we recognise as ourselves we call our body; the other part we call the world. The limit of expansion in time we call motion. That part of motion which we recognise as our-selves we call our life; the other part we call the life of the world. All of life is the expansion of these limits, the being freed from them. (All unclear, inexact.)
Nov. 20. Moscow.
Much I have not written out. I am in Mos-cow. . . . For 70 years I have been lowering and lowering my opinion of women and still it has to be lowered more and more. The woman ques-tion! How can there not be a woman question? Only not in this, how women should begin to di-rect life, but in this, how they should stop ruining it.
All morning I have not been writing and have been thinking two things:
i ) We speak of the end of life although it is true, not the one which we understand, but the one which would be understood by the highest reason. The purpose is just the same as the cause. The cause is looking backward, the purpose is look-ing forward, but the cause, the conception of the cause (and therefore of an end) appears only then when there is time, i.e., a being is limited in his conceptions by time. And therefore for God,
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and for man living a Godly life, there is no pur-pose. There is life in which consciousness grows (? 393 ) and that is all.
2) A drop fusing with a great drop, a pool, ceases to be and begins to be.
To-day December 18. Moscow.
Almost a month I have not written. Have been severely ill. 394 Had acute pain for one day, then a respite, and weakness. And death became more than natural, almost desirable. And so it has remained now, when I am getting well that is a new, joyous step.
Finished Resurrection. Not good, uncorrected, hurried; but it has fallen from me and I am no longer interested. Serezha is here, Masha and her husband, Maria Alexandrovna.
I am all right. Have not yet begun to write anything. More than anything I am occupied with , 395 but I have no desire for any-
thing very much, am resting. Wrote letters.
I am attempting to write out my notes :
1) (Trifles) about many-voiced music. It is necessary that the voice say something, but here there are many voices and each one says nothing.
2) One of the principal causes of evil in our life is the faith cultivated in our Christian world, the faith in the crude Hebrew personal God, when the principal sign (if one can express it so) of
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God is that he is not limited, by anything, conse-quently not personal.
3 ) One should conquer death not death, but the fear of death coming from a lack of under-standing of life. If only you understand life and its necessarily good purpose death then you cease to fear it, to resist it. And when you cease to fear it, you cease to serve yourself, a mortal, and you will serve an immortal : God, from whom you came and to whom you are going.
4) Matter is everything which is accessible to our senses. Science forces us to suppose matter inaccessible to our senses. In this realm, there can be beings composed of that matter and per-ceiving it, matter inaccessible to our senses. I do not think that there are such beings; I only think that our matter and our senses perceiving it, are only one of innumerable 396 possibilities of life.
5 ) “I am a slave, I am a worm, I am a Czar, I am a God.” 397 Slave and worm true, but Czar and God untrue. It is in vain that people attrib-ute a special significance and greatness to his rea-son. The limits of human reason are very narrow and are seen at once. These limits are the infinity of space and time. Man sees the final answers to the questions he asks himself, recede and recede in time and also in space, and in both these realms.
6) I read about Englehardt’s book: Evolution, the Progress of Cruelty. 598 I think that here
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there is a great deal of truth. Cruelty has in-creased mainly because division of labour has been brought to pass, which assists the increase of the material wealth of man. Every one speaks of the benefits of the division of labour, not see-ing that the inevitable condition of the division of labour, besides the mechanising of man, is also the removing of those conditions which call forth a human, moral communion between people. If we are doing the same work, as agricultural labour-ers, then naturally there would be established be-tween us an exchange of service, a mutual aid, but between the shepherd and the factory-weaver, there can be no communion.
(This seems untrue; I shall think it over.) 7) What would God’s attitude be towards prayer, if there were such a God to whom one could pray? Just the same as would be the atti-tude of the owner of a house where water had been introduced and to whom the inhabitants would come to ask for water. The water has been intro-duced. You have only to turn the tap. In the same way everything has been prepared for men which is necessary to them, and God is not at fault that instead of making use of the clean water which was there, some of the tenants carry water from a stagnant pond, others fall into de-spair from lack of water and beg for that which had been given them in such abundance.
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8) …
9) One can by personal experience verify the truth, that God, a part of Whom is my own self, is love, and by the experimental way convince one’s self of this truth. As soon as love is violated, life ends. There is no desire to do anything, everything is depressing, and on the contrary, as soon as love is restored, as soon as you have made peace with those whom you quarrelled, forgiven, received forgiveness then you wish to live, to act, everything seems easy and possible.
10) It would be good to express even in ap-proximate numbers and then graphically, that quantity of labour, of working days, which rich people use up in their lives. Approximately more or less, this could be expressed by money. If I spend 10 roubles a day, that means that 20 men are working constantly for me. (Unclear, not what I want to say.)
n) They generally say: “That is very deep, and therefore not to be fully understood.” This is untrue. On the contrary. Everything that is deep is clear to transparency. Just as water is murky on top, but the deeper it is, the more trans-parent.
12) One small part of people, about 20 per cent., is insane by itself,
