20) The principal aim of art, if there is art, and if it has an aim, is to manifest and to express the truth about man’s soul, to express those mysteries which it is impossible to express simply by speech. From this springs art. Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the mysteries of his soul and shows to people those mysteries which are common to all. 21) Love, enclosed in man and freed by reason, manifests itself in two ways: 1, by its expansion, and 2, by the establishment of the Kingdom of God. It is steam which, in spreading, works. 22) Lately, I have begun to feel such firmness and strength, not my own, but that of that God’s work which I wish to serve, that the irritation, the reproaches, the mocking people hostile to the work of God, is strange to me; they are pitiable, touching. 23) The world, living unconsciously, and man, in the period of his childhood, performed unconsciously the work of God. Having awakened to consciousness, he does it consciously. In the collision between the two methods of serving, man ought to know that the unconscious passes and will pass into the conscious and not the opposite and that therefore it is necessary to give oneself over to the future and not to the past. (Stupid.) 24) The delusion of man who has awakened to consciousness and who continues to consider his own separate being as himself, is that he considers a tool as himself. If you feel pain at the disturbing of the good of your separate being, it is as if you felt on your hand the blows on the tool with which you work. The tool has to be taken care of, ground, but not to be considered as oneself. 25) God Himself is economical. He has to penetrate all with love. He has fired man alone with love and has placed him in the necessity of firing all the rest. 26) Nothing affects the religious outlook so much as the way we look upon the world; whether with a beginning and an end, as it was looked upon in antiquity, or infinite as it is looked upon now. In a finite world, one can construct a reasonable rôle for separate mortal man, but in an infinite world the life of such a being has no meaning. 27) (_For Konevsky_) It happens to Katiusha after her resurrection, that she has certain periods in which she smiles slyly and lazily as if she had forgotten all which she considered true before; she is merely joyous and wants to live. 28) To him who lives a spiritual life entirely, life here becomes so uninteresting and burdensome that he can part with it easily. 29) Natasha Strakhov[82] asks her father, when he speaks of something which happened when she was not yet born: “Where was I then?” I would have answered: “You were asleep and had not yet waked up here.” Conception, birth, childhood are only a preparation to an awakening, which we see, but not the sleeping ones.