than his own, which he condemned; and when he began thinking of the well-being of the masses he would all of a sudden ask himself: “What business have I to think of it?” He felt that he had nothing to live for. He even had no wishes which he could recognise as reasonable. “If a fairy had come to me, and offered to satisfy my wish, I should not have known what to wish ... I even could not wish to know Truth, because I had guessed of what it would consist. The Truth was, that life is nonsense.” He had no aim in life, no purpose, and he realised that without a purpose, and with its unavoidable sufferings, life is not worth living (_Confession_, VI, VII). He had not--to use his own expression--“the moral bluntness of imagination” which would be required not to have his Epicureanism poisoned by the surrounding misery; and yet, like Schopenhauer, he had not the Will that was necessary for adjusting his actions in accordance with the dictates of his reason. Self-annihilation, death, appeared therefore as a welcome solution. However, Tolstóy was too strong a man to end his life in suicide. He found an outcome, and that outcome was indicated to him by a return to the love which he had cherished in his youth: _the love of the peasant masses_. “Was it in consequence of a strange, so to say a physical love of the truly working people,” he writes--or of some other cause? but he understood at last that he must seek the sense of life among the millions who toil all their life long. He began to examine with more attention than before the life of these millions. “And I began,” he says, “to love these people.” And the more he penetrated into their lives, past and present, the more he loved them, and “the easier it was for me to live.” As to the life of the men of his own circle--the wealthy and cultured, “I not only felt disgust for it: it lost all sense in my eyes.” He understood that if he did not see what life was worth living for, it was his own life “in exclusive conditions of epicureanism” which had obscured the truth. “I understood,” he continues, “that my question, ‘What is life?’ and my reply to it, ‘Evil,’ were quite correct. I was only wrong in applying them to life altogether. To the question, ‘What is life?’ I had got the reply, ‘Evil and nonsense!’ And so it was. My own life--a life of indulgence in passions--was void of sense and full of evil, but this was true of my life only, not of the life of all men. Beginning with the birds and the lowest animals, all live to maintain life and to secure it for others besides themselves, while I not only did not secure it for others: I did not secure it even for myself. I lived as a parasite, and, having put to myself the question, ‘What do I live for?’ I got the reply, ‘For no purpose.’”