A Confession

Tolstoy’s search for answers to the questions of life, “What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?” (34), yielded no real answers. He discovered that the sciences pretend to have answers but never properly address the meaning of life. The experimental sciences, including mathematics, do not even acknowledge the question, although they provide answers to other questions. What Tolstoy calls the “speculative” sciences, including psychology, sociology, and metaphysics, do address the question of life but never answer it.

For a time, Tolstoy found satisfaction in the idea that everything in life is evolving and becoming more complex, that laws governed this process, that he was part of a whole, and that through a process of education he could understand his place in the whole. He also believed that humanity “develops according to the spiritual principles, according to the ideals that guide it” (37) and felt his mission was to help humanity realize these ideals. Tolstoy finally dropped these ideas when he realized they were meaningless because “in the infinite there is nothing either simple or complex, nothing before or after, nothing better or worse” (36).

Tolstoy chastises scientists who stray from their proper task, which for the experimental scientist is “to determine the causal sequences of material phenomena” and for the speculative scientist is “to discover the essence of life that lies beyond cause and effect” (39).