I drew a line from one end of the oblong figure to the edge of the
board. 'Why should there not be a corresponding line on the other
side? If there be an eternity on one side, there must surely be a
corresponding one on the other? That means that we have existed in a
previous life, but have lost the recollection of it.'
This conclusion--which seemed to me at the time both clear and novel,
but the arguments for which it would be difficult for me, at this
distance of time, to piece together--pleased me extremely, so I took a
piece of paper and tried to write it down. But at the first attempt
such a rush of other thoughts came whirling though my brain that I was
obliged to jump up and pace the room. At the window, my attention was
arrested by a driver harnessing a horse to a water-cart, and at once my
mind concentrated itself upon the decision of the question, 'Into what
animal or human being will the spirit of that horse pass at death?' Just
at that moment, Woloda passed through the room, and smiled to see me
absorbed in speculative thoughts. His smile at once made me feel that
all that I had been thinking about was utter nonsense.
I have related all this as I recollect it in order to show the reader
the nature of my cogitations. No philosophical theory attracted me so
much as scepticism, which at one period brought me to a state of mind
verging upon insanity. I took the fancy into my head that no one nor
anything really existed in the world except myself--that objects were
not objects at all, but that images of them became manifest only so soon
as I turned my attention upon them, and vanished again directly that
I ceased to think about them. In short, this idea of mine (that real
objects do not exist, but only one's conception of them) brought me to
Schelling's well-known theory. There were moments when the influence
of this idea led me to such vagaries as, for instance, turning sharply
round, in the hope that by the suddenness of the movement I should come
in contact with the void which I believed to be existing where I myself
purported to be!
What a pitiful spring of moral activity is the human intellect! My
faulty reason could not define the impenetrable. Consequently it
shattered one fruitless conviction after another--convictions which,
happily for my after life, I never lacked the courage to abandon as soon
as they proved inadequate. From all this weary mental struggle I derived
only a certain pliancy of mind, a weakening of the will, a habit
of perpetual moral analysis, and a diminution both of freshness of
sentiment and of clearness of thought. Usually abstract thinking
develops man's capacity for apprehending the bent of his mind at certain
moments and laying it to heart, but my inclination for abstract thought
developed my consciousness in such a way that often when I began to
consider even the simplest matter, I would lose myself in a labyrinthine
analysis of my own thoughts concerning the matter in question. That is
to say, I no longer thought of the matter itself, but only of what I was
thinking about it. If I had then asked myself, 'Of what am I thinking?'
the true answer would have been, 'I am thinking of what I am thinking;'
and if I had further asked myself, 'What, then, are the thoughts of
which I am thinking?' I should have had to reply, 'They are attempts
to think of what I am thinking concerning my own thoughts'--and so on.
Reason, with me, had to yield to excess of reason. Every philosophical
