Ever since the time when Tolstoï saw the dreams of his childhood vanish,--began to think for himself, and to experience the religious crisis which usually arrives between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five,--his soul, like a storm-tossed bark, has oscillated between pantheism and the blackest pessimism. What depths of despair a soul like that of Tolstoï can know, unable to rest upon the pillow of doubt, when it abnegates the noblest of human faculties,--thought and intelligence,--and makes choice of a merely vegetative life in preference to that of the rational being! Lost in the gloom of this dark wilderness, he falls into the region of absolute nihilism. He admits this in his confessions ("My Religion") when he says: "For thirty-five years of my life I have been a nihilist in the rigorous acceptation of the term; that is to say, not merely a revolutionary socialist, but a man who believes in nothing whatever." In fact, since the age of sixteen, as we read in his "Memoirs," his mind summoned to judgment all accepted and consecrated doctrines and philosophical opinions, and that which most suited the boy was scepticism, or rather a sort of transcendental egoism; he allows himself to think that nothing exists in the world but himself; that exterior objects are vain apparitions, no longer real to his mind; impressed and persuaded by this fixed idea, he believes he sees, materially, behind and all around him, the abyss of nothingness, and under the effect of this hallucination he falls into a state of mind that might be called truly motor madness, though it was transitory and momentary,--a state proper to the visionary peoples of the North, and to which they give an involved appellation difficult to pronounce; to translate it exactly, with all its shades of signification, I should have to mix and mingle together many words of ours, such as despair, fatalism, asceticism, intractability, brief delirium, lunacy, mania, hypochondria, and frenzy,--a species of dementia, in fine, which, snapping the mainspring of human will, induces inexplicable acts, such as throwing one's self into an abyss, setting fire to a house for the pleasure of it, holding the muzzle of a pistol to one's forehead and thinking, "Shall I pull the trigger?" or, on seeing a person of distinction, to pull him by the nose and shake him like a child. This momentary but real dementia--from which nobody is perhaps entirely exempt, and which Shakespeare has so admirably analyzed in some scenes of "Hamlet"--is to the individual what panic is to the multitude, or like _epidemia chorea_, or a suicidal monomania which sometimes seems to be in the air; its origin lies deep in the mysterious recesses of our moral being, where other strange psychical phenomena are hidden, such as, for example, the fascination of seeing blood flow, and the innate love of destruction and death.