“I hate those ideas with all my heart!” he said, “I was infected by them myself in my youth, I have not quite got rid of them even now, and I tell you—­perhaps because I am stupid and such thoughts were not the right food for my mind—­they did me nothing but harm.  That’s easy to understand!  Thoughts of the aimlessness of life, of the insignificance and transitoriness of the visible world, Solomon’s ‘vanity of vanities’ have been, and are to this day, the highest and final stage in the realm of thought.  The thinker reaches that stage and—­comes to a halt!  There is nowhere further to go.  The activity of the normal brain is completed with this, and that is natural and in the order of things.  Our misfortune is that we begin thinking at that end.  What normal people end with we begin with.  From the first start, as soon as the brain begins working independently, we mount to the very topmost, final step and refuse to know anything about the steps below.”

“What harm is there in that?” said the student.

“But you must understand that it’s abnormal,” shouted Ananyev, looking at him almost wrathfully.  “If we find means of mounting to the topmost step without the help of the lower ones, then the whole long ladder, that is the whole of life, with its colours, sounds, and thoughts, loses all meaning for us.  That at your age such reflections are harmful and absurd, you can see from every step of your rational independent life.  Let us suppose you sit down this minute to read Darwin or Shakespeare, you have scarcely read a page before the poison shows itself; and your long life, and Shakespeare, and Darwin, seem to you nonsense, absurdity, because you know you will die, that Shakespeare and Darwin have died too, that their thoughts have not saved them, nor the earth, nor you, and that if life is deprived of meaning in that way, all science, poetry, and exalted thoughts seem only useless diversions, the idle playthings of grown up people; and you leave off reading at the second page.  Now, let us suppose that people come to you as an intelligent man and ask your opinion about war, for instance:  whether it is desirable, whether it is morally justifiable or not.  In answer to that terrible question you merely shrug your shoulders and confine yourself to some commonplace, because for you, with your way of thinking, it makes absolutely no difference whether hundreds of thousands of people die a violent death, or a natural one:  the results are the same—­ashes and oblivion.  You and I are building a railway line.  What’s the use, one may ask, of our worrying our heads, inventing, rising above the hackneyed thing, feeling for the workmen, stealing or not stealing, when we know that this railway line will turn to dust within two thousand years, and so on, and so on. . . .  You must admit that with such a disastrous way of looking at things there can be no progress, no science, no art, nor even thought itself.  We fancy that we are cleverer than the