I can not write my Declaration of Faith. It is unclear, metaphysical, and whatever good there is in it, I spoil. I am thinking of beginning it all from the beginning again or to call a stop and get to work on a novel or a drama. N.[73] was here; it was a difficult love test. I passed it only outwardly and even then badly. If the examiner had gone along thoroughly, skipping about, I would have failed shamefully. A beautiful article by Menshikov, “The Blunders of Fear.”[74] How joyous! I can almost die, even absolutely, and yet it always seems as if there is something still to be done. Do it and the end will take care of itself. If you are no longer fit for the work, you will be changed and a new one will be sent and you will be sent to another work. If only one rises in work! Strakhov Th. A.[75] was here. The other one, N.,[76] came to me in my sleep. I had a talk with him[77] about the Declaration of Faith. In speaking to him I felt how hazy was the desire for the good in itself. And I corrected it this way: 1) A man at a certain period of his development awakens to a consciousness of his life. He sees that everything about him lives (and he himself lived like that before the awakening of his reason) without knowing its life. Now that he has learned that he lives, he understands that force which gives life to the whole world and in his consciousness he coincides with it, but being limited by his separate being (his organism), it seems to him that the purpose of this force which gives life to the world, is the life of his separate being. (_I thought that I would write it clearly and again I am confused;--evidently I am not ready._) Life is the desire for the good. (Everything that lives, lives only because it desires the good; that which does not desire the good, does not live.) Man, when awakened to a reasoning consciousness, is conscious of life in himself, i. e. of the desire for the good. But since this consciousness is engendered in the separate bodily being of man, since man learns that life is the desire for the good when he is already separated from others by his bodily being, therefore, in the first awakening of man to a reasoning consciousness, it seems to him that life, i. e. the desire for the good which he recognises in himself, has for its object his separate bodily being. And man begins to live consciously for the good of his separate being, begins to use that reason of his which revealed to him the essence of all life; the desire for the good, in order to secure the good for his own separate being.