For example, when Count Leo was in his 33d year, his brother Nicolai died. Leo was present at the bedside and described the scene with the utmost frankness regarding its effect upon his mind; and again we note that awful fear and hopeless questioning which characterizes the sense-conscious man whose intellect has been cultivated to the very edge of the line which separates the self-conscious life from the cosmic conscious. This questioning, with the fear and dread and terror of death and of the "ceaseless round of births" and the cares and sorrows of existence was what drove Prince Siddhartha from his father's court and Mohammed into the mountains to meditate and pray until the answer came in the light of illumination. It came to Tolstoi through the very intensity of his powers of reason and analysis; through the sword-like quality of mental urge--a much more sorrowful path than the one through the simple way of love and service and prayer. His comments upon the death of his brother give us a vivid idea of the state of mind of the Tolstoi of that age: "Never in my life has anything had such an effect upon me. He was right (referring to his brother's words) when he said to me there is nothing worse than death, and if you remember that death is the inevitable goal of all that lives, then it must be confessed that there is nothing poorer than life. Why should we be so careful when at the end of all things nothing remains of what was once Nicolai Tolstoi? Suddenly he started up and murmured in alarm: 'What is this?' He saw that he was passing into nothingness." From the above it will be seen that the Tolstoi of those days was a materialist pure and simple. "He saw that he was passing into nothingness," he said of his brother, as though there could be no question as to the nothingness of the individual consciousness that he had known as Nicolai, his brother. This soul-harrowing materialism haunted Tolstoi during all the years of his youth and early manhood, and threw him constantly into fits of melancholy and inner brooding. He could neither dismiss the subject from his mind, nor could he bring into the area of his mortal consciousness that serene contemplation and optimistic line of reasoning which marks all that Emerson wrote. Tolstoi's morbid horror of decay and death was not in any sense due to a lack of physical courage. It was the inevitable repulsion of a strong and robust animalism of the body, coupled with a powerful mentality--both of which are barriers to the "still small voice" of the soul, through which alone comes the conviction of the nothingness of death. A biographer says of Tolstoi: