part for the whole and physical life for the whole of life,” but the sovereign law which rules the life of man, “the law according to which reasonable beings, that is men, must of necessity live their lives.”
“It is a law analogous to those which regulate the nutrition and the reproduction of the animal, the growth and the blossoming of herb and of tree, the movement of the earth and the planets. It is only in the accomplishment of this law, in the submission of our animal nature to the law of reason, with a view to acquiring goodness, that we truly live… Reason cannot be defined, and we have no need to define it, for not only do we all know it, but we know nothing else… All that man knows he knows by means of reason and not by faith…[1] True life commences only at the moment when reason is manifested. The only real life is the life of reason.”
Then what is the visible life, our individual existence? “It is not our life,” says Tolstoy, “for it does not depend upon ourselves.
“Our animal activity is accomplished without ourselves… Humanity has done with the idea of life considered as an individual existence. The
- ↑ In a letter Upon Reason, written on November 26, 1894,
to Baroness X (reproduced in The Revolutionaries, 1906),
Tolstoy says the same thing:
“Man has received directly from God one sole instrument by which he may know himself and his relations with the world: there is no other means. This instrument is reason. Reason comes from God. It is not only the highest human quality, but the only means by which the truth is to be known.”
