But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me: the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naïvely imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted on that assumption. From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice: abnormally developed pride, and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what. To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them to-day) is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum. We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote--teaching others. And without remarking that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life's questions: What is good and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all, not listening to one another, talked at the same time, sometimes backing and praising one another in order to be backed and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another--just as in a lunatic asylum. Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their strength day and night setting the type and printing millions of words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on teaching and could nohow find time to teach enough, and were always angry that sufficient attention was not paid to us. It was terribly strange, but is now quite comprehensible. Our real innermost consideration was, that we wanted to get as much money and praise as possible. To gain this end we could do nothing except write books and papers. So we did that. But in order to do such useless work and feel assured that we were very important people, we required a theory justifying our activity. And so among us this theory was devised: 'All that exists develops. And it all develops by means of Culture. And Culture is measured by the circulation of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and are respected because we write books and newspapers, and therefore we are the most useful and the best of men.' This theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous, but as every thought expressed by one of us was always met by a diametrically opposed thought expressed by some one else, we ought to have been driven to reflection. But we ignored this; people paid us money, and those on our side praised us; so each one of us considered himself justified. CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER V Birukof. Behrs.