“I can’t possibly put myself at their point of view. I remember when I was young and an officer I was never bothered by these questions; somehow they did not arise in me. But I cannot imagine that I should pass by such a problem, if I happened to come across it. I remember two such cases in my life. One, when Vasili Ivanovich Alexeev,[11] when I was at the height of my career as a landlord, expressed to me for the first time the idea that the ownership of land is evil. I remember how much I was struck by the idea, and how at once perfectly new horizons opened before me. So it also happened when some one, I don’t remember who it was, I think a Frenchman, told me that prostitution was an abnormal thing, and not only useless, but really harmful to mankind. Schopenhauer, for instance, says that it is only owing to prostitution that family relations are still preserved in the community. I had not previously thought about it, but, on hearing the Frenchman speak, I at once felt the truth of what he said and could no longer go back. I can imagine that one’s thoughts may not tend in a certain direction; one may be ignorant of some point of view. But I cannot understand that incapacity and unwillingness to learn.” _July 9th._ Speaking of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms Tolstoi said: “Aphorisms are perhaps the best way of expounding philosophical judgments. For instance, Schopenhauer’s aphorisms (_Parerga and Paralipomena_) express his conception of the world much more clearly than _The World as Will and Imagination_. A philosopher, in explaining a whole complicated system, sometimes involuntarily ceases to be honest. He becomes the slave of his system, for the symmetry of which he is often prepared to sacrifice the truth.” Speaking of Lichtenberg’s beautiful German style, Tolstoi said: “Every literary language reaches its highest point and then begins to decline. In the German language that time was at the end of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century; it was the same with the French language. Now both in Germany and France the language has become utterly spoilt. In Russia we are now finding ourselves on the border-line. The Russian language has quite lately reached its apex and now it begins to decay.” Tolstoi praised Chekhov’s language very highly for its simplicity, compactness, and expressiveness. Gorky’s language he disapproves of, thinking it artificial and rhetorical. When Nicolas II. appeared in many places to bless the troops going to the Japanese war with icons, Tolstoi said: