Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 8
and all the women believed, and his wife believed as simply as he had believed
in his earliest childhood, and ninety-nine hundredths of the Russian people, all the
working people for whose life he felt the deepest respect, believed.
Another fact of which he became convinced, after reading many scientific books,
was that the men who shared his views had no other construction to put on them,
and that they gave no explanation of the questions which he felt he could not live
without answering, but simply ignored their existence and attempted to explain
other questions of no possible interest to him, such as the evolution of organisms,
the materialistic theory of consciousness, and so forth.
Moreover, during his wife’s confinement, something had happened that seemed
extraordinary to him. He, an unbeliever, had fallen into praying, and at the moment
he prayed, he believed. But that moment had passed, and he could not make his
state of mind at that moment fit into the rest of his life.
He could not admit that at that moment he knew the truth, and that now he was
wrong; for as soon as he began thinking calmly about it, it all fell to pieces. He could
not admit that he was mistaken then, for his spiritual condition then was precious to
him, and to admit that it was a proof of weakness would have been to desecrate those
moments. He was miserably divided against himself, and strained all his spiritual
forces to the utmost to escape from this condition.
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