No truly scientific thinker needs to be reminded that Tolstoï here, in the _a priori_ assumption that life must have a meaning, departs from the fundamental principle of all scientific reasoning--namely, the starting without a hypothesis, and, like Kant, to whom he feels drawn not without reason, works with postulates instead of with conclusions. But who will not rejoice that the poet, who above all things was and is a passionate human creature, has saved himself from the despair of agnosticism by a bold leap to the rock of faith, which lies beyond all science, and can neither be supported nor shaken by it? How many of the proud agnostics do not secretly cast furtive glances at that rock, where they would like to reserve themselves a place against emergencies? While Tolstoï sincerely acknowledges that without this foundation under his feet he would no longer be able to live. He needed this quieting as to the outcome of things to be able to follow his poetic impulse to look at the world as it is. Only entirely barren, abstract natures find their satisfaction in the voluntarily limited logical sequence of science, confined as it is to the empirical. All men of imagination, including Goethe and Bismarck, have had their share of mystic confidence in that beneficent course of the universe which in popular language is called God or Providence. This poetic faith has, of course, nothing whatever to do with science. Undervaluation of one's own qualities, however, and enthusiasm for the complementary ones, is a familiar psychological fact. The poet Tolstoï wishes to be a cut-and-dried philosopher. He repudiates his poetry, and likewise speaks coldly--indeed, even with hostility--of the spirits akin to him, of Goethe and Shakespeare. There is only one opinion among lovers of art, and that is that Tolstoï, in the natural spontaneity of his characters and incidents, is to be compared with these two alone, and in the abundance of his psychological traits with Shakespeare only. Yet at present Tolstoï is engaged in writing a book, soon to appear, against Shakespeare and the study of Shakespeare. In our conversation he came back to the indefensible over-estimation of this artist. "If people were capable of approaching Shakespeare impartially they would lose their unreasonable reverence for this writer. He is crude, immoral, a toady to the great, an arrogant despiser of the small, a slanderer of the common people. He lacks good taste in his jests, is unjust in his sympathies, ignoble, intoxicated with the acquaintance with which a few aristocrats honored him. Even his art is over-estimated, for in every case the best comes from his predecessors or his sources. But people are quite blind. They are under the spell of the consensus of opinion handed down for centuries. It is truly incredible what ideas can be awakened in the human mind by consecutive treatments of one and the same theme."