The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

well that we are only allowed to go on eating our

dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the

ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt,

thanks to the policeman’s revolver or the soldier’s rifle, which

will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his

share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our

pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not the

policeman and the soldier there prepared to run up at our first

call for help.

 

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the

act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to

rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we

too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the

soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for

defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and f�tes

and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do

not know that men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right

to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that

they do not like working underground, in the water, or in stifling

heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to

manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it

impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

 

Still, there are, among the rich, especially among the young, and

among women, persons whom I am glad to meet more and more

frequently, who, when they are shown in what way and at what cost

their pleasures are purchased, do not try to conceal the truth,

but hiding their heads in their hands, cry: “Ah! don’t speak of

that. If it is so, life is impossible.” But though there are

such sincere people who even though they cannot renounce their

fault, at least see it, the vast majority of the men of the modern

world have so entered into the parts they play in their hypocrisy

that they boldly deny what is staring everyone in the face.

 

“All that is unjust,” they say; “no one forces the people to work

for the landowners and manufacturers. That is an affair of free

contract. Great properties and fortunes are necessary, because

they provide and organize work for the working classes. And labor

in the factories and workshops is not at all the terrible thing

you make it out to be. Even if there are some abuses in

factories, the government and the public are taking steps to

obviate them and to make the labor of the factory workers much

easier, and even agreeable. The working classes are accustomed to

physical labor, and are, so far, fit for nothing else. The

poverty of the people is not the result of private property in

land, nor of capitalistic oppression, but of other causes: it is

the result of the ignorance, brutality, and intemperance of the

people. And we men in authority who are striving against this

impoverishment of the people by wise legislation, we capitalists

who are combating it by the extension of useful inventions, we

clergymen by religious instruction, and we liberals by the

formation of trades unions, and the diffusion of education, are in

this way increasing the prosperity of the people without changing

our own positions. We do not want all to be as poor as the poor;

we want all to be as rich as the rich. As for the assertion that

men are ill treated and murdered to force them to work for the

profit of the rich, that is a sophism. The army is only called

out against the mob, when the people, in ignorance of their own

interests, make disturbances and destroy the tranquillity

necessary for the public welfare. In the same way, too, it is

necessary to keep in restraint the malefactors for whom the

prisons and gallows are established. We ourselves wish to

suppress these forms of punishment and are working in that

direction.”

 

Hypocrisy in our day is supported on two sides: by false religion

and by false science. And it has reached such proportions that if

we were not living in its midst, we could not believe that men

could attain such a pitch of self-deception. Men of the present

day have come into such an extraordinary condition, their hearts

are so hardened, that seeing they see not, hearing they do not

hear, and understand not.

 

Men have long been living in antagonism to their conscience. If

it were not for hypocrisy they could not go on living such a life.

This social organization in opposition to their conscience only

continues to exist because it is disguised by hypocrisy.

 

And the greater the divergence between actual life and men’s

conscience, the greater the extension of hypocrisy. But even

hypocrisy has its limits. And it seems to me that we have reached

those limits in the present day.

 

Every man of the present day with the Christian principles

assimilated involuntarily in his conscience, finds himself in

precisely the position of a man asleep who dreams that he is

obliged to do something which even in his dream he knows he ought

not to do. He knows this in the depths of his conscience, and all

the same he seems unable to change his position; he cannot stop

and cease doing what he ought not to do. And just as in a dream,

his position becoming more and more painful, at last reaches such

a pitch of intensity that he begins sometimes to doubt the reality

of what is passing and makes a moral effort to shake off the

nightmare which is oppressing him.

 

This is just the condition of the average man of our Christian

society. He feels that all that he does himself and that is done

around him is something absurd, hideous, impossible, and opposed

to his conscience; he feels that his position is becoming more and

more unendurable and reaching a crisis of intensity.

 

It is not possible that we modern men, with the Christian sense of

human dignity and equality permeating us soul and body, with our

need for peaceful association and unity between nations, should

really go on living in such a way that every joy, every

gratification we have is bought by the sufferings, by the lives of

our brother men, and moreover, that we should be every instant

within a hair’s-breadth of falling on one another, nation against

nation, like wild beasts, mercilessly destroying men’s lives and

labor, only because some benighted diplomatist or ruler says or

writes some stupidity to another equally benighted diplomatist or

ruler.

 

It is impossible. Yet every man of our day sees that this is so

and awaits the calamity. And the situation becomes more and more

insupportable.

 

And as the man who is dreaming does not believe that what appears

to him can be truly the reality and tries to wake up to the actual

real world again, so the average man of modern days cannot in the

bottom of his heart believe that the awful position in which he is

placed and which is growing worse and worse can be the reality,

and tries to wake up to a true, real life, as it exists in his

conscience.

 

And just as the dreamer need only make a moral effort and ask

himself, “Isn’t it a dream?” and the situation which seemed to him

so hopeless will instantly disappear, and he will wake up to

peaceful and happy reality, so the man of the modern world need

only make a moral effort to doubt the reality presented to him by

his own hypocrisy and the general hypocrisy around him, and to ask

himself, “Isn’t it all a delusion?” and he will at once, like the

dreamer awakened, feel himself transported from an imaginary and

dreadful world to the true, calm, and happy reality.

 

And to do this a man need accomplish no great feats or exploits.

He need only make a moral effort.

 

But can a man make this effort?

 

According to the existing theory so essential to support

hypocrisy, man is not free and cannot change his life.

 

“Man cannot change his life, because he is not free. He is not

free, because all his actions are conditioned by previously

existing causes. And whatever the man may do there are always

some causes or other through which he does these or those acts,

and therefore man cannot be free and change his life,” say the

champions of the metaphysics of hypocrisy. And they would be

perfectly right if man were a creature without conscience and

incapable of moving toward the truth; that is to say, if after

recognizing a new truth, man always remained at the same stage of

moral development. But man is a creature with a conscience and

capable of attaining a higher and higher degree of truth. And

therefore even if man is not free as regards performing these or

those acts because there exists a previous cause for every act,

the very causes of his acts, consisting as they do for the man of

conscience of the recognition of this or that truth, are within

his own control.

 

So that though man may not be free as regards the performance of

his actions, he is free as regards the foundation on which they

are performed. Just as the mechanician who is not free to modify

the movement of his locomotive when it is in motion, is free to

regulate the machine beforehand so as to determine what the

movement is to be.

 

Whatever the conscious man does, he acts just as he does, and not

otherwise, only because he recognizes that to act as he is acting

is in accord with the truth, or because he has recognized it at

some previous time, and is now only through inertia, through

habit, acting in accordance with his previous recognition of

truth.

 

In any case, the cause of his action is not to be found in any

given previous fact, but in the consciousness of a given relation

to truth, and the consequent recognition of this or that fact as a

sufficient basis for action.

 

Whether a man eats or does not eat, works or rests, runs risks or

avoids them, if he has a conscience he acts thus only because he

considers it right and rational, because he considers that to act

thus is in harmony with truth, or else because he has made this

reflection in the past.

 

The recognition or non-recognition of a certain truth depends not

on external causes, but on certain other causes within the man

himself. So that at times under external conditions apparently

very favorable for the recognition of truth, one man will not

recognize it, and another, on the contrary, under the most

unfavorable conditions will, without apparent cause, recognize it.

As it is said in the Gospel, “No man can come unto me, except the

Father which hath sent me draw him.” That is to say, the

recognition of truth, which is the cause of all the manifestations

of human life, does not depend on external phenomena, but on

certain inner spiritual characteristics of the man which escape

our observation.

 

And therefore man, though not free in his acts, always feels

himself free in what is the motive of his acts—the recognition or

non-recognition of truth. And he feels himself independent not

only of facts external to his own personality, but even of his own

actions.

 

Thus a man who under the influence of passion has committed an act

contrary to the truth he recognizes, remains none the less free to

recognize it or not