In his subsequent works, Tolstoy was to complete these precepts of moral hygiene. He was anxious to achieve the cure of the soul, to replenish its energy, by proscribing the vicious pleasures which deaden the conscience[9] and the cruel pleasures which kill it.[10] He himself set the example. In 1884, he sacrificed his most deeply rooted passion: his love of the chase.[11] He practised abstinence, which strengthens the will. So an athlete may subject himself to some painful discipline that he may grapple with it and conquer. _What shall we do?_ marks the first stage of the difficult journey upon which Tolstoy was about to embark, quitting the relative peace of religious meditation for the social maëlstrom. It was then that the twenty years' war commenced which the old prophet of Yasnaya Polyana waged in the name of the Gospel, single-handed, outside the limits of all parties, and condemning all; a war upon the crimes and lies of civilisation. [1] "I had hitherto passed my whole life away from the city." (_What shall we do?_) [2] Tolstoy has many times expressed his antipathy for the "ascetics, who live for themselves only, apart from their fellows." He puts them in the same class as the conceited and ignorant revolutionists, "who pretend to do good to others without knowing what it is that they themselves need .... I love these two categories of men with the same love, but I hate their doctrines with the same hate. The only doctrine is that which orders a constant activity, an existence which responds to the aspirations of the soul and endeavours to realise the happiness of others. Such is the Christian doctrine. Equally remote from religious quietism and the arrogant pretensions of the revolutionists, who seek to transform the world without knowing in what real happiness consists." (Letters to a friend, published in the volume entitled _Cruel Pleasures,_ 1895.) [3] A daguerreotype of 1885, reproduced in _What shall we do?_ in the complete French edition. [4] _What shall we do?_ [5] All the first part of the book (the first fifteen chapters). [6] "The true cause of poverty is the accumulation of riches in the hands of those who do not produce, and are concentrated in the cities. The wealthy classes are gathered together in the cities in order to enjoy and to defend themselves. And the poor man comes to feed upon the crumbs of the rich. He is drawn thither by the snare of easy gain: by peddling, begging, swindling, or in the service of immorality." [7] "The pivot of the evil is property. Property is merely the means cf enjoying the labour of others." Property, he says again, is that which is not ours: it represents other people. "Man calls his wife, his children, his slaves, his goods his property, but reality shows him his error; and he must renounce his property or suffer and cause others to suffer."