Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART EIGHT CHAPTER 12
“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.”
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