A knowledge of the social surroundings in which Tolstoy grew up makes it easier to understand the doctrines he subsequently taught. It was partly because he grew up in a detached and irresponsible position that the state of his own mind and soul were to him so much more important than the immediate effect of his conduct on others, and the same cause led him to remain in ignorance of lessons every intelligent man of business among us learns of necessity. His independent position made easier the formation of that state of mind free from intellectual prejudice which enabled him later on to examine the claims of the Church, of the Bible, of the economists, of governments, and the most firmly established manners and customs of society, untrammelled by the fear of shocking or hurting other people, though all the time his feelings were so sensitive that it has never been possible for him to doubt or question the goodness of those lines of conduct which he had admired and approved when in childhood he saw them practised by those near and dear to him. Contrasting his moral attitude with that of a young Englishman anxious to do right in our day, I should say that Tolstoy had no adequate sense of being a responsible member of a complex community with the opinions and wishes of which it is necessary to reckon. On the contrary, his tendency was to recognise with extraordinary vividness a personal duty revealed by the working of his own conscience and intellect apart from any systematic study of the social state of which he was a member. He thus came to see things in a way we do not see them, while he remained blind to some things with which we are quite familiar. That is one reason why he is so extraordinarily interesting: he puts things in a way no Englishman would ever dream of putting them, and yet we feel how near akin we of the Western twentieth-century world are to this nineteenth-century Russian noble, who has so much in common with the medieval saint and the Oriental fatalist; and this helps us to realise that all nations and classes of men are, indeed, of one blood. Later on, in the sequel to this work, when we have to deal with Tolstoy's peaceful anarchism and his conviction that no external regulation of society is necessary, but that all men would naturally do right were they not hampered by man-made laws, it will be useful to bear in mind that his own strength grew through having to steer unaided through the stormy seas of passion, and from finding his own way to a haven the lights of which had first shone on him in childhood. Like the rest of mankind, he judges others by himself. CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER II Birukof. Behrs. _Novy Mir._ _Education and Instruction_, and _On the Education of the People_, in vol. iv. of Tolstoy's collected works: Moscow, 1903. _Confession._ Published by the _Svobodnoe Slovo_, Christchurch, 1901. Prof. Zagoskin, _Stoudentcheskie gody gr. Tolstogo_, in _Istoritchesky Vestnik_: January 1894.