Does Tolstoy believe in the divinity of Christ? By no means. In what quality does he invoke him? As the greatest of the line of sages--Brahma, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Zoroaster, Isaiah--who have revealed to man the true happiness to which he aspires, and the way which he must follow.[11] Tolstoy is the disciple of these great religious creators, of these Hindu, Chinese, and Hebrew demi-gods and prophets. He defends them, as he knows how to defend; defends them by attacking those whom he calls "the Scribes" and "the Pharisees"; by attacking the established Churches and the representatives of arrogant science, or rather of "scientific philosophism." Not that he appealed from reason to revelation. Once escaped from the period of distress described in his _Confessions_, he remained essentially a believer in Reason; one might indeed say a mystic of Reason. "In the beginning was the Word," he says, with St. John; "the Word, Logos, that is, Reason.[12] A book of his entitled _Life_ (1887) bears as epigraph the famous lines of Pascal:[13] "Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.... All our dignity resides in thought.... Let us then strive to think well: that is the principle of morality." The whole book, moreover, is nothing but a hymn to Reason. It is true that Tolstoy's Reason is not the scientific reason, the restricted reason "which takes the part for the whole and physical life for the whole of life," but the sovereign law which rules the life of man, "the law according to which _reasonable beings, that is men,_ must of necessity live their lives." "It is a law analogous to those which regulate the nutrition and the reproduction of the animal, the growth and the blossoming of herb and of tree, the movement of the earth and the planets. It is only in the accomplishment of this law, in the submission of our animal nature to the law of reason, with a view to acquiring goodness, that we truly live.... Reason cannot be defined, and we have no need to define it, for not only do we all know it, but we know nothing else.... All that man knows he knows by means of reason and not by faith....[14] True life commences only at the moment when reason is manifested. The only real life is the life of reason." Then what is the visible life, our individual existence? "It is not our life," says Tolstoy, "for it does not depend upon ourselves. "Our animal activity is accomplished without ourselves.... Humanity has done with the idea of life considered as an individual existence. The negation of the possibility of individual good remains an unchangeable truth for every man of our period who is endowed with reason."