Has Tolstoi found any other answer by his desperate seeking? No. The explanation which his pondering and searching did not offer him was, as we have seen in the above-quoted passage in _My Confessions_, given him by ‘the enormous majority of mankind, who ... labour and suffer, and, nevertheless, are quiet and clear in their minds as to the aim of life.’ ‘I understood,’ he adds, ‘that one must return to their simple faith to live as these men do.’ The conclusion is arbitrary, and is a _saltum_ of mystic thought. ‘The masses live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life,’ not because they have a ‘simple faith,’ but because they are healthy, because they like to feel themselves alive, because life gives them, in every organic function, in every manifestation of their powers, at every moment, some gratification. The ‘simple faith’ is the accidental accompanying phenomenon of this natural optimism. No doubt the majority of the uneducated classes, who represent the healthy portion of mankind, and therefore certainly rejoice in life, receive, during childhood, instruction in religious faith, and afterwards only rarely rectify through their own thought the errors which, for state reasons, have been imparted to them; but their unthinking belief is a consequence of their poverty and ignorance, like their bad clothing, insufficient food, and insanitary dwellings. To say that the majority ‘live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life,’ because they ‘have simple faith,’ is quite as logical a sequitur as the assertion that this majority ‘live quietly, and are clear in their minds as to the aim of life’ because they chiefly eat potatoes, or because they live in cellars, or because they seldom take baths. Tolstoi has rightly noticed the fact that the majority do not share his pessimism, and rejoice in their life, but he has explained it mystically. Instead of recognising that the optimism of the masses is simply a sign of their vitality, he traces it to their belief, and then seeks in faith the clue to the aim of his existence. ‘I was led to Christianity,’ he writes in another book,[160] ‘neither through theological nor historical research, but by the circumstance that when, at fifty years of age, I asked myself and the wise among my acquaintance what myself and my life might signify, and received the answer: “You are an accidental concatenation of parts; there is no significance in life; life as such is an evil.”--I was then brought to despair, and wished to kill myself. Remembering, however, that formerly, in childhood, when I believed, life had a meaning for me, and that the people about me who believe--the greater number being men unspoilt by riches--both believe and lead real lives, I doubted the accuracy of the answer which had been given me by the wisdom of my circle, and endeavoured to understand that answer which Christianity gives to men who lead a real life.’[161]