Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of the beliefs in which he had been brought up.

“What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, if I had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must live for God and not for my own desires?  I should have robbed and lied and killed.  Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of my life would have existed for me.”  And with the utmost stretch of imagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he would have been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

“I looked for an answer to my question.  And thought could not give an answer to my question—­it is incommensurable with my question.  The answer has been given me by life itself, in my knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.  And that knowledge I did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to all men, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

“Where could I have got it?  By reason could I have arrived at knowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him?  I was told that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for they told me what was already in my soul.  But who discovered it?  Not reason.  Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and the law that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfaction of our desires.  That is the deduction of reason.  But loving one’s neighbor reason could never discover, because it’s irrational.”

Chapter 13

And Levin remembered a scene he had lately witnessed between Dolly and her children.  The children, left to themselves, had begun cooking raspberries over the candles and squirting milk into each other’s mouths with a syringe.  Their mother, catching them at these pranks, began reminding them in Levin’s presence of the trouble their mischief gave to the grown-up people, and that this trouble was all for their sake, and that if they smashed the cups they would have nothing to drink their tea out of, and that if they wasted the milk, they would have nothing to eat, and die of hunger.

And Levin had been struck by the passive, weary incredulity with which the children heard what their mother said to them.  They were simply annoyed that their amusing play had been interrupted, and did not believe a word of what their mother was saying.  They could not believe it indeed, for they could not take in the immensity of all they habitually enjoyed, and so could not conceive that what they were destroying was the very thing they lived by.

“That all comes of itself,” they thought, “and there’s nothing interesting or important about it because it has always been so, and always will be so.  And it’s all always the same.  We’ve no need to think about that, it’s all ready.  But we want to invent something of our own, and new.  So we thought of putting raspberries in a cup, and cooking them over a candle, and squirting milk straight into each other’s mouths.  That’s fun, and something new, and not a bit worse than drinking out of cups.”