vol. xxx, no. 4 april 1926 universal brotherhood - a fact in nature

THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH
Seeing that his fellow-men could not understand his thoughts and
aspirations, feeling the wide chasm which was gruadally forming between
himself and his contemporaries, lost in the turmoil of social life with its
pleasures and vain interests, Tolstoy shut himself into his own being,
and entered more and more into the depths of his own soul, to search
there for the true answer to the burning Question.
In 1856, he stayed several months in Yasnaya Polyana, and then
took the resolution of going to Europe, in order to see how the western
civilization with its famous 'culture' had solved the great problem that
tormented him.
He thought the brilliant philosophy of Europe of which he knew
only through study and research-work at his university, would shed a
splendid light on his soul and give him the explanation of all the riddles
he saw before his eyes. Alas! Instead of the help he was looking for,
instead of the answer his soul was craving, Tolstoy discovered in Europe
but the spectacle of utter helplessness before the problem of life. He
was discouraged and felt as if some one was trying to drown him in the
darkness of the mysterious unknown, terrible just because it was unknown.
Behind the triumph of science and industry, under the veil of
apparent splendor and glorious decorations of external life, he saw the
misery, the ignorance, the barbarism, the cruelty, the crass materialism
of European civilization, and the hideous mask under which was hidden
the horrible decay of that 'modern culture,' so much praised by those
who have not seen its dark side. Tolstoy was baffled by the absence of
unity in that civilization; he was surprised not to find anything that
could be called the feeling of brotherhood towards one's fellow-man;
he was disgusted with the vanity, the ambition, the harsh selfishness
which "destroy the need of instinctive and loving association" of men,
as he expresses it.
In Paris, Tolstoy saw an execution; one of those legalized crimes
of our days, which boast of being the justice of the twentieth century.
He was impressed beyond words to say. In his Confessions, he writes
about the spectacle he saw in Paris :
"Evcn if Humanity, on the ground of wliatever theory, had found from the he-
ginning of the world to thc present time this punishment [capital punishment] as necessary,
1 MYSELF KNOW TIIAT IT IS NOT. AND THAT IT IS AN EVIL ACTION. And even if me11 and progress
tried to prove to me that this puriishment is beneficial, S'IY HEART, SOLE JULIGE, WILL DENY
IT FOR EVER."
Tolstoy had lost all faith in 'civilization.' He had lost the hope
of finding in it the solution of the riddle of life, and he entered still deeper
into his own consciousness. For a moment he thought that the happiness