5) Men, in struggling with untruth and superstition, often console themselves with the quantity of superstition they have destroyed. This is not right. It is not right to calm oneself until all that is contradictory to reason and demands credulence is destroyed. Superstition is like a cancer. Everything must be cleaned out if one undertakes an operation. But if a little bit is left, everything will grow from it again. 6) The historic knowledge of how different myths and beliefs arose among peoples in different places and in different times ought to, it seems, destroy the faith that these myths and beliefs which have been inoculated in us from our infancy, constitute the absolute truth; but nevertheless, so-called educated people believe in them. How superficial then, is the education of so-called educated people! 7) To-day at dinner there was talk about a boy with vicious inclinations who was expelled from school, and about how good it would be to give him over to a reformatory. It is exactly what a man does who lives a bad life, harmful to his health, and who, when he becomes ill, turns to the doctor so that the latter may cure him, but has no idea that the illness was given to him as a beneficial indicator that his whole life is bad and that he ought to change it. The same thing is true with the illnesses in our society; every ill member of society does not remind us that the whole life of our society is irregular and that we ought to change it. But we think that for every such ill member, there is or ought to be, an institution freeing us from this member or even bettering him. Nothing hampers the progress of humanity so much as this false conviction. The more ill the society, the more institutions there are for the healing of symptoms and the less anxiety for changing the entire life. It is now 10 o’clock in the evening. I am going to supper. I want to work very much, but am without intellectual energy; a great weakness, yet I want to work terribly. If God would only give it to-morrow. _Feb. 28. Nicholskoe. If I live._ _To-day March 6. Nicholskoe._ All this time I have felt weakness and intellectual apathy. I am working on the drama very slowly. Much has become clear. But there isn’t one scene with which I am fully satisfied. To-day I was about to plan something silly: to write out an outline of the Declaration of Faith. Of course it didn’t go. In the same way I began and dropped a letter to the Italians.[59] During this time I jotted down: 1) Corneille writes in his _Préface_ to Menteur on art, that its aim is a diversion, “_divertir_,” but that it must not be harmful, and if possible, it ought to be educationally enlightening. 2) At supper there was a discussion on heredity: they say vicious people are born from an alcoholic ... (I can’t clearly express my thought and will put it by.)