Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 3
But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, what do you mean to say, then?”
“I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me...my interest, I shall always
defend to the best of my ability; that when they made raids on us students, and the
police read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend
my rights to education and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service,
which affects my children, my brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate on what
concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of district
council money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka–I don’t understand, and I can’t
do it.”
Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst open.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.
“But tomorrow it’ll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your tastes better
to be tried in the old criminal tribunal?”
“I’m not going to be tried. I shan’t murder anybody, and I’ve no need of it. Well, I
tell you what,” he went on, flying off again to a subject quite beside the point, “our
district self-government and all the rest of it–it’s just like the birch branches we stick
in the ground on Trinity Day, for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up
of itself in Europe, and I can’t gush over these birch branches and believe in them.”
Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express his wonder
how the birch branches had come into their argument at that point, though he
did really understand at once what his brother meant.
“Excuse me, but you know one really can’t argue in that way,” he observed.
But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of which he was
conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he went on.
“I imagine,” he said, “that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not
founded on self-interest, that’s a universal principle, a philosophical principle,” he
said, repeating the word “philosophical” with determination, as though wishing to
show that he had as much right as any one else to talk of philosophy.
Sergey Ivanovitch smiled. “He too has a philosophy of his own at the service of
his natural tendencies,” he thought.
“Come, you’d better let philosophy alone,” he said. “The chief problem of the
philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indispensable connection which
exists between individual and social interests. But that’s not to the point; what is to
the point is a correction I must make in your comparison. The birches are not simply
stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one must deal carefully with
them. It’s only those peoples that have an intuitive sense of what’s of importance
and significance in their institutions, and know how to value them, that have a future
before them–it’s only those peoples that one can truly call historical.”
And Sergey Ivanovitch carried the subject into the regions of philosophical history
where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and showed him all the incorrectness
of his view.
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