He listened, drew a deep breath and said in a whisper:

“Open that door, and go in … don’t be afraid.”

Laevsky, puzzled, opened the door and went into a room with a low ceiling and curtained windows.

There was a candle on the table.

“What do you want?” asked some one in the next room. “Is it you, Muridov?”

Laevsky turned into that room and saw Kirilin, and beside him Nadyezhda Fyodorovna.

He didn’t hear what was said to him; he staggered back, and did not know how he found himself in the street. His hatred for Von Koren and his uneasiness all had vanished from his soul. As he went home he waved his right arm awkwardly and looked carefully at the ground under his feet, trying to step where it was smooth. At home in his study he walked backwards and forwards, rubbing his hands, and awkwardly shrugging his shoulders and neck, as though his jacket and shirt were too tight; then he lighted a candle and sat down to the table.…

XVI

“The ‘humane studies’of which you speak will only satisfy human thought when, as they advance, they meet the exact sciences and progress side by side with them. Whether they will meet under a new microscope, or in the monologues of a new Hamlet, or in a new religion, I do not know, but I expect the earth will be covered with a crust of ice before it comes to pass. Of all humane learning the most durable and living is, of course, the teaching of Christ; but look how differently even that is interpreted! Some teach that we must love all our neighbours but make an exception of soldiers, criminals, and lunatics. They allow the first to be killed in war, the second to be isolated or executed, and the third they forbid to marry. Other interpreters teach that we must love all our neighbours without exception, with no distinction of plus or minus. According to their teaching, if a consumptive or a murderer or an epileptic asks your daughter in marriage, you must let him have her. If crêtins go to war against the physically and mentally healthy, don’t defend yourselves. This advocacy of love for love’s sake, like art for art’s sake, if it could have power, would bring mankind in the long run to complete extinction, and so would become the vastest crime that has ever been committed upon earth. There are very many interpretations, and since there are many of them, serious thought is not satisfied by any one of them, and hastens to add its own individual interpretation to the mass. For that reason you should never put a question on a philosophical or so- called Christian basis; by so doing you only remove the question further from solution.”

The deacon listened to the zoologist attentively, thought a little, and asked:

“Have the philosophers invented the moral law which is innate in every man, or did God create it together with the body?”

“I don’t know. But that law is so universal among all peoples and all ages that I fancy we ought to recognise it as organically connected with man. It is not invented, but exists and will exist. I don’t tell you that one day it will be seen under the microscope, but its organic connection is shown, indeed, by evidence: serious affections of the brain and all socalled mental diseases, to the best of my belief, show themselves first of all in the perversion of the moral law.”

“Good. So then, just as our stomach bids us eat, our moral sense bids us love our neighbours. Is that it? But our natural man through self-love opposes the voice of conscience and reason, and this gives rise to many brain-racking questions. To whom ought we to turn for the solution of those questions if you forbid us to put them on the philosophic basis?”