We feel that Tolstoy is afraid of the dark; that to him there is something wrong in the whole of human life, a radical mistake. He is conscious that, with all his genius, he has only been able to record the fact that all that he has found in life is not what he is looking for, but something irrelevant and unessential; and, at the same time, that he has not been able to determine the thing in life which is not a mistake, nor where the true aim, the essential thing, is to be found, nor in what it consists. It is at this moment that the crisis occurred in Tolstoy’s life which divides it outwardly into two sections, although it constitutes no break in his inward evolution. The fear of the dark, of the abyss yawning in front of him, was so strong that he felt he must rid himself of it at all costs. “I felt terror” (he writes) “of what was awaiting me, though I knew that this terror was more terrible than my position itself; I could not wait patiently for the end; my horror of the darkness was too great, and I felt I must rid myself of it as soon as possible by noose or bullet.” This terror was not a physical fear of death, but an abstract fear, arising from the consciousness that the cold mists of decay were rising round him. By the realisation of the nothingness of everything, of what Leopardi calls “l’infinita vanità del tutto,” he was brought to the verge of suicide. And then came the change which he describes thus in his _Confession_: “I grew to hate myself; and now all has become clear to me.” This was the preliminary step of the development which led him to believe that he had at last found the final and everlasting truth. “A man has only got not to desire lands or money, in order to enter into the kingdom of God.” Property, he came to believe, was the source of all evil. “It is not a law of nature, the will of God, or a historical necessity; rather a superstition, neither strong nor terrible, but weak and contemptible.” To free oneself from this superstition he thought was as easy as to stamp on a spider. He desired literally to carry out the teaching of the Gospels, to give up all he had and to become a beggar.