2) Read about Granovsky.[78] In our literature it is customary to say, that during the reign of Nicholas conditions were such that it was impossible to express great thoughts. (Granovsky complains of this and others too.) But the thoughts there were not real. It is all self-deception. If all those Granovskys, Bielinskys,[79] and others had anything to say, they would have said it, no matter what the obstacles. The proof is Herzen.[80] He went away abroad and despite his enormous talent, what did he say that was new, necessary? All those Granovskys, Bielinskys, Chernishevskys,[81] Dobroliubovs, who were raised to great men, ought to be grateful to the government and the censorship without which they would have been the most unnoticed of sketch-writers. Perhaps the Bielinskys, Granovskys, and the other unimportant ones might have had something real within them, but they stifled it, imagining they had to serve society with the forms of social life and not to serve God by professing the truth and by preaching it without any care about the forms of social life. Let there be contents and the forms will shape themselves. People acting thus, i. e. adapting their striving for truth to the existing forms of society, are like a being to whom wings have been given to fly, without knowing obstacles, and who used these wings in order to help itself in walking. Such a being would not attain its ends--every obstacle would stop it and it would spoil its wings. And then this being would complain that it had been held back and would tell with sorrow (like Granovsky) that it would have gone far if obstacles had not held it back. The quality of real spiritual activity is such, that it is impossible to hold it back. If it is held back, then it means only one thing: it is not real. 3) Man dying little by little (growing old) experiences that which a sprouting seed ought to experience which has not yet transferred its consciousness from the seed to the plant. He feels that he grows less, but he is not conscious of himself there where he increases; in another life. I am beginning to experience this. 4) I wrote down: “Reason is a tool for the recognition of truth, verification, criticism.” I can’t remember very well. It seems to me, and I am even certain of it, that it is this: Under reason is understood many different intellectual activities and very complex ones, and therefore the correctness of the solutions of reason is often doubted. As an answer to this doubt, I say, that there is an activity of the reason which is not to be doubted, namely, the critical activity, the activity of verifying what is told me. They tell me that God ... etc. I submit this to the verification of reason and decide without doubt that that which is not reasonable does not exist for me. It is wrong to say that everything which exists is reasonable, or that everything which is reasonable exists, but it is wrong not to say that that which is unreasonable does not exist for me.