“As I found no explanation in science,” Tolstoi went on, in his poignant narrative, “I began to look for the answer in life, hoping to find it in the men around me.” “My intellect was at work, but also something else, something that I can call only the consciousness of life, like some strong force that compelled my intellect to turn in another direction and to rescue me from my desperate condition.” The new direction was the feeling of faith. “However I might put to myself the question: how must I live? the answer was—by the law of God. Whither tends my present life? To eternal pain or to blessedness everlasting. How is my life not destroyed by death? By eternal union with God, by heaven. And thus I was led inevitably to see that quite independently of human knowledge, which formerly seemed to me the only guide, mankind had another guide, a guide that is irrational; faith which makes life possible. Faith seemed to be as irrational as ever, but I could not but recognise that faith alone gave mankind an answer to the problem of life, and in consequence made life possible. Reason had led me to the conviction that life was absurd, and so, there being no longer a reason to live, I had wished to kill myself. Looking at mankind as a whole, I saw that men kept alive by assuring themselves that they saw a meaning in life. I myself came back to that point of view. I had reached a time when there seemed to me to be no meaning in life. But as to other men, so to me, life and the possibility of living were offered by faith.” Driven in the direction of faith, Tolstoi reached the following conclusion: “The object of a man’s life is the salvation of his soul; for that, we must live in God, and to live in God it is necessary to give up the pleasures of life, to work, to submit, to suffer and to be charitable.” And this conclusion led to the other that “a faith has value in so far as it gives a meaning to life which is not destroyed by death.” It is plain then that all this evolution, the beginning of which was the fear of death, ended in belief in something beyond death. And it is also plain why Tolstoi should have been as bitter against science as I have shown him to be. Tolstoi does not afford the only example of a case where the failure of science to solve the problem of death has led to the abandonment of science in favour of religion. Brunetière, if it is possible to judge from his published writings, traversed similar paths in his journey to the Catholic religion.