"If the individual man's life were completely known to him when he passes from one stage of maturity to another, he would have no reason for living. So it is with the life of mankind too; if at its entrance upon a new stage of growth a programme lay before it already drawn up, this would be the surest sign that it was not alive, not progressing, but that it was sticking at one point. The details of a new order of life cannot be known to us, they have to be worked out by us ourselves. Life consists only in learning to know the unknown, and putting our action in harmony with the new knowledge. In this consists the life of the individual, in this the life of human societies and of humanity."[1064] 5.--PROPERTY I. _Together with law Tolstoi necessarily has to reject also, for the more highly developed nations of our time, the legal institution of property._ Perhaps there was once a time when the violence necessary to secure the individual in the possession of a piece of goods against all others was less than the violence which would have been practised in a general fight for the possession of the goods, so that the existence of property was better than its non-existence. But at any rate this time is past, the existing order has "lived out its time";[1065] among the men of to-day no wild fight for the possession of goods would break out even if there were no property; they all "profess allegiance to the commands of philanthropy,"[1066] each of them "knows that all men have equal rights in the goods of the world,"[1067] and already we see "many a rich man renounce his inheritance from a specially delicate sense of germinant public opinion."[1068] Property offends against love, especially against the commandment not to resist evil by force.[1069] But not only this; in founding a dominion of possessors over non-possessors it also offends against the principle that for love "all men are God's sons and there is equality among them all";[1070] and it is therefore to be rejected, even aside from the violence on which it is based as a legal institution. The rich are under "guilt by the very fact that they are rich."[1071] It is "a crime"[1072] that tens of thousands of "hungry, cold, deeply degraded human beings are living in Moscow, while I with a few thousand others have tenderloin and sturgeon for dinner and cover horses and floors with blankets and carpets."[1073] I shall be "an accomplice in this unending and uninterrupted crime so long as I still have a superfluous bit of bread while another has no bread at all, or still possess two garments while another does not possess even one."[1074]--Tolstoi carries this out into detail. 1. Property means the dominion of the possessors over the non-possessors.