"Man has received directly from God one sole instrument by which he may know himself and his relations with the world: there is no other means. This instrument is reason. Reason comes from God. It is not only the highest human quality, but the only means by which the truth is to be known." [15] _Life_, xxii.-xxv. As in the case of most of these quotations, I am expressing the sense of several chapters in a few characteristic phrases. [16] I hope later, when the complete works of Tolstoy have been published, to study the various shades of this religious idea, which has certainly evolved in respect of many points, notably in respect of the conception of future life. [17] From a translation in the _Temps_ for May 1, 1901. CHAPTER XI REALITY He thought he had arrived in port, had achieved the haven in which his unquiet soul might take its repose. He was only at the beginning of a new period of activity. A winter passed in Moscow (his family duties having obliged him to follow his family thither),[1] and the taking of the census, in which he contrived to lend a hand, gave him the occasion to examine at first hand the poverty of a great city. The impression produced upon him was terrible. On the evening of the day when he first came into contact with this hidden plague of civilisation, while relating to a friend what he had seen, "he began to shout, to weep, and to brandish his fist." "People can't live like that!" he cried, sobbing. "It cannot be! It cannot be!" He fell into a state of terrible despair, which did not leave him for months. Countess Tolstoy wrote to him on the 3rd of March, 1882: "You used to say, 'I used to want to hang myself because of my lack of faith.' Now you have faith: why then are you so unhappy?" Because he had not the sanctimonious, selfsatisfied faith of the Pharisee; because he had not the egoism of the mystic, "who is too completely absorbed in the matter of his own salvation to think of the salvation of others";[2] because he knew love; because he could no longer forget the miserable creatures he had seen, and in the passionate tenderness of his heart he felt as though he were responsible for their sufferings and their abjectness; they were the victims of that civilisation in whose privileges he shared; of that monstrous idol to which an elect and superior class was always sacrificing millions of human beings. To accept the benefit of such crimes was to become an accomplice. His conscience would have given him no repose had he not denounced them. _What shall we do?_ (1884-86) is the expression of this second crisis; a crisis far more tragic than the first, and far richer in consequences. What were the personal religious sufferings of Tolstoy in this ocean of human wretchedness--of material misery, not misery created by the mind of a self-wearied idler? It was impossible for him to shut his eyes to it, and having seen it he could but strive, at any cost, to prevent it. Alas! was such a thing possible?