bent on the earth,’ could make out nothing and could not find my bearings in this mass of essential and non-essential ideas.  It appeared that I, the thinker, had not mastered the technique of thinking, and that I was no more capable of managing my own brain than mending a watch.  For the first time in my life I was really thinking eagerly and intensely, and that seemed to me so monstrous that I said to myself:  ‘I am going off my head.’  A man whose brain does not work at all times, but only at painful moments, is often haunted by the thought of madness.

“I spent a day and a night in this misery, then a second night, and learning from experience how little my philosophy was to me, I came to my senses and realised at last what sort of a creature I was.  I saw that my ideas were not worth a brass farthing, and that before meeting Kisotchka I had not begun to think and had not even a conception of what thinking in earnest meant; now through suffering I realised that I had neither convictions nor a definite moral standard, nor heart, nor reason; my whole intellectual and moral wealth consisted of specialist knowledge, fragments, useless memories, other people’s ideas—­and nothing else; and my mental processes were as lacking in complexity, as useless and as rudimentary as a Yakut’s. . . .  If I had disliked lying, had not stolen, had not murdered, and, in fact, made obviously gross mistakes, that was not owing to my convictions—­I had none, but because I was in bondage, hand and foot, to my nurse’s fairy tales and to copy-book morals, which had entered into my flesh and blood and without my noticing it guided me in life, though I looked on them as absurd. . . .

“I realised that I was not a thinker, not a philosopher, but simply a dilettante.  God had given me a strong healthy Russian brain with promise of talent.  And, only fancy, here was that brain at twenty-six, undisciplined, completely free from principles, not weighed down by any stores of knowledge, but only lightly sprinkled with information of a sort in the engineering line; it was young and had a physiological craving for exercise, it was on the look-out for it, when all at once quite casually the fine juicy idea of the aimlessness of life and the darkness beyond the tomb descends upon it.  It greedily sucks it in, puts its whole outlook at its disposal and begins playing with it, like a cat with a mouse.  There is neither learning nor system in the brain, but that does not matter.  It deals with the great ideas with its own innate powers, like a self-educated man, and before a month has passed the owner of the brain can turn a potato into a hundred dainty dishes, and fancies himself a philosopher . . . .

“Our generation has carried this dilettantism, this playing with serious ideas into science, into literature, into politics, and into everything which it is not too lazy to go into, and with its dilettantism has introduced, too, its coldness, its boredom, and its one-sidedness and, as it seems to me, it has already succeeded in developing in the masses a new hitherto non-existent attitude to serious ideas.