I wonder which more effectually makes a man rush forwards without looking back: the knowledge that behind him hovers the head of Medusa, with horrible snakes, ready to turn him into stone; or the certainty that in the rear lies the unchangeable order laid down by the law of causality and by modern science. Judging from what we see, judging from the degree of tension which human thought has reached to-day, it would seem that the head of Medusa is less terrible than the law of causality. In order to escape the latter, man will face anything. Rather than return to the bosom of scientific cause and effect, he embraces madness: not that fine frenzy of madness which spends itself in fiery speeches, but technical madness, for which one is stowed away in a lunatic asylum. 76 "To experience a feeling of joy or sorrow, of triumph or despair, _ennui_ or happiness, and so on, without having sufficient cause for such feeling, is an unfailing sign of mental disease...." One of the modern truths which is seeing its last days. 77 Count Tolstoy's German biographer regrets the constant misunderstanding and quarrels which took place between Tolstoy and Turgenev. He reminds us of Goethe and Schiller, and thinks that Russian literature would have gained a great deal if the two remarkable Russian writers had been more pacific, had remained on constantly friendly terms with one another, and bequeathed to posterity a couple of volumes of letters dealing with literary and philosophic subjects. It might have been very nice--but I refuse to imagine Tolstoy and Turgenev keeping up a long, peaceful correspondence, particularly on high subjects. Nearly every one of Turgenev's opinions drove Tolstoy to madness, or was capable of so driving him. Dostoevsky's dislike of Turgenev was even stronger than Tolstoy's; he wrote of him very spitefully and offensively, libelling him rather than drawing a caricature. Evidently Dostoevsky, like Tolstoy, detested the "European" in their _confrere._ But here he was mistaken, in spite of his psychological acuteness. To Dostoevsky, it was enough that Turgenev wore European clothes and tried to appear like a westerner. He himself did the opposite: he tried to get rid of every trace of Europeanism from himself, apparently without great success, since he failed to make clear to himself wherein lay the strength of Europe, and where her sting. Nevertheless, the late Mikhailovsky is not wrong in calling Dostoevsky a seeker of buried treasure. Surely, in the second half of his literary activity Dostoevsky no longer sought for the real fruits of life. There awoke in him the Russian, the elemental man, with a thirst for the miraculous. Compared with what he wanted, the fruits of European civilisation seemed to him trivial, flat, insipid. The age-long civilisation of his neighbours told him that there never had been a miracle, and never would be. But all his being, not yet broken-in by civilisation, craved for the stupendous unknown.