inevitable sign of narrow self-sufficiency, which dreads doubt and is consequently always superficial. If a man offers you a solution of eternal questions, it shows he has not even begun to think about them. He has only "acted." Perhaps it is not necessary to think--who can say how we ought or ought not to live? And how could we be brought to live "as we ought," when our own nature is and always will be an incalculable mystery. There is no mistake about it, nobody _wants_ to think, I do not speak here of logical thinking. That, like any other natural function, gives man great pleasure. For this reason philosophical systems, however complicated, arouse real and permanent interest in the public provided they only require from man the logical exercise of the mind, and nothing else. But to think---really to think--surely this means a relinquishing of logic. It means living a new life. It means a permanent sacrifice of the dearest habits, tastes, attachments, without even the assurance that the sacrifice will bring any compensation. Artists and philosophers like to imagine the thinker with a stern face, a profound look which penetrates into the unseen, and a noble bearing--an eagle preparing for flight. Not at all. A thinking man is one who has lost his balance, in the vulgar, not in the tragic sense. Hands raking the air, feet flying, face scared and bewildered, he is a caricature of helplessness and pitiable perplexity. Look at the aged Turgenev, his Poems in Prose and his letter to Tolstoy. Maupassant thus tells of his meeting with Turgenev: " There entered a giant with a silvery head." Quite so! The majestic patriarch and master, of course! The myth of giants with silver locks is firmly established in the heart of man. Then suddenly enters Turgenev in his Prose Poems--pale, pitiful, fluttering like a bird that has been "winged." Turgenev, who has taught us everything--how can he be so fluttered and bewildered? How could he write his letter to Tolstoy? Did he not know that Tolstoy was finished, the source of his creative activity dried up, that he must seek other activities. Of course he knew--and still he wrote that letter. But it was not for Tolstoy, nor even for Russian literature, which, of course, is not kept going by the death-bed letters and covenants of its giants. In the dreadful moments of the end, Turgenev, in spite of his noble size and silver locks, did not know what to say or where to look for support and consolation. So he turned to literature, to which he had given his life.... He yearned that she, whom he had served so long and loyally, should just once help him, save him from the horrible and thrice senseless nightmare. He stretched out his withered, numbing hands to the printed sheets which still preserve the traces of the Soul of a living, suffering man. He addressed his late enemy Tolstoy with the most flattering name: "Great writer of the Russian land"; recollected that he was his