Long ago I copied from Nietzsche a page I should like to read to you. When he wrote it, had Nietzsche not in view what constitutes the essential value of the great Russian novelist, what opposes him diametrically to many of our modern novelists, to the Goncourts, for example, whom Nietzsche seems to indicate in these lines? “_A Moral for Psychologists._--Do not go in for any notebook psychology! Never observe for the sake of observing! Such things lead to a false point of view, to a squint, to something forced and exaggerated! To experience things on purpose--this is not a bit of good. In the midst of an experience a man should not turn his eyes upon himself; in such cases any eye becomes the ‘evil eye.’ A born psychologist instinctively avoids seeing for the sake of seeing. And the same holds good of the born painter. Such a man never works ‘from Nature’--he leaves it to his instinct, to his _camera obscura_ to sift and to define the ‘fact,’ ‘nature,’ the ‘experience.’ The general idea, the conclusion, the result is the only thing that reaches his consciousness. He knows nothing of that wilful process of deducing from particular cases. What is the result when a man sets about the matter differently?--When, for instance, after the manner of Parisian novelists, he goes in for notebook psychology on a large and small scale? Such a man is constantly spying on reality, and every evening he bears home a handful of fresh curios.... But look at the result!”[69] Dostoevsky never observes for observation’s sake. His work is not the result of observations of the real; or at least, not of that alone. Nor is it the fruit of a preconceived idea, and that is why it is never mere theorizing, but remains steeped in reality. It is the fruit of intercourse between fact and idea, a blending, in the proper English sense of the word, of the one with the other, so perfect that it can never be said that one element outweighs the other. Hence the most realistic scenes in his novels are the most pregnant with psychological and moral import. To be precise, each work of Dostoevsky’s is produced by the crossing of fact and idea. “The germ of the novel has been in me for the last three years,” he wrote in 1870,[70] referring to _The Brothers Karamazov_, not written until nine years later. In another letter he says: “The chief problem dealt with throughout this particular work is the very one which has, my whole life long, tormented my conscious or subconscious being: the question of the existence of God.”[71]