5. To study History, Geography, and Statistics. 6. To study Mathematics (the High School course). 7. To write my [University] thesis. 8. To reach the highest perfection I can in music and painting. 9. To write down rules (for my conduct). 10. To acquire some knowledge of the natural sciences, and, 11. To write essays on all the subjects I study. Such rules and resolutions abound in Tolstoy's Diary. After failing to act up to them, he again and again gathers his energies and maps out for himself plans of life and courses of study sufficient to tax the energies of an intellectual giant. As to his religious opinions at this time, he tells us: I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and all through my boyhood and youth. But before I left the University, in my second year, at the age of eighteen, I no longer believed anything I had been taught. (_Confession._) His Diary nevertheless shows that he prayed frequently and earnestly; the fact no doubt being, that though intellectually he discarded the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church, in times of trouble or distress he instinctively appealed to God for help. His opinions were wavering and immature, as he himself tells us in another passage: The religious beliefs taught me in childhood disappeared... and as from the time I was fifteen I began to read philosophic works, my rejection of those beliefs very soon became a conscious one. From the age of sixteen I ceased going to Church and fasting of my own accord. I did not believe what had been taught me from childhood, but I believed in something. What it was I believed in, I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God; but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in I could also not have said. Looking back on that time now, I see clearly that my faith--my only real faith, that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life--was a belief in perfecting oneself. But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally--I studied everything I could: anything life threw in my way; I tried to perfect my will, I drew up rules which I tried to follow; I perfected myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be perfecting myself. The beginning of it all was, of course, moral perfecting; but that was soon replaced by perfecting in general: by the desire to be better, not in one's own eyes or those of God, but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others. (_Confession._)