Anna Karenina - Part 8

One fact he had found out since these questions had engrossed his

mind, was that he had been quite wrong in supposing from the

recollections of the circle of his young days at college, that

religion had outlived its day, and that it was now practically

non-existent. All the people nearest to him who were good in

their lives were believers. The old prince, and Lvov, whom he

liked so much, and Sergey Ivanovitch, 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.