All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less

systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt

that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning

the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest

thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was

in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did

not know — I only felt that the conclusion was rationally

convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions

could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my

reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an

untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought

me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but something else

was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life. A

force was working which compelled me to turn my attention to this

and not to that; and it was this force which extricated me from my

desperate situation and turned my mind in quite another direction.

This force compelled me to turn my attention to the fact that I and

a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind, and that

I did not yet know the life of mankind.

Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people

who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and

drowned it in life’s intoxication, or had understood it and ended

their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were living

out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed to me

that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to

which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those

milliards of others who have lived and are living were cattle of

some sort — not real people.

Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me

that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life

of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a

degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and Solomon’s

and Schopenhauer’s, is the real, normal life, and that the life of

the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of attention — strange

as this now is to me, I see that so it was. In the delusion of my

pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and

Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and

exactly that nothing else was possible — so indubitable did it

seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet

arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question —

that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring

to me to ask: “But what meaning is and has been given to their

lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived

in the world?”

I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in

words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and

learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical

affection I have for the real labouring people, which compelled me

to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we

suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could

know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang

myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live

and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not

among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among

those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who

support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. And I

considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor

people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite

different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards

who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and

that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for

they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary

clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life

consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments.

Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a

meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as

death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they

consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a

knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of

life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the

meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to

life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some

despised pseudo-knowledge.

Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies

the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of

mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that

irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not

but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the

devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as

I retain my reason.

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along

the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there

— in faith — was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet

more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational

knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it

is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and

I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and

an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the

meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which

alone a meaning is required.