The life and teaching of Leo Tolstoy Author:Leo Tolstoy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II SOCIETY I.—The State In An Age Of Violence However conscious a man may be of the new design and purpose revealed to him by his reason, he goe... more »s on in the old fashion until his life has become intolerably inconsistent and therefore distressing. Humanity has outgrown its social, its civic age, and has entered upon a new epoch. . . . One needs but to compare the practice of life with its theory to be horrified at the extraordinary contradictions between the conditions of life and our inner consciousness. Man's whole life is a continual contradiction of what he knows to be his duty. This contradiction prevails in every department of life, in the economical, the political, and the international. The man of education suffers even more than a workman from these inconsistencies. If he has any faith whatever he believes, perhaps in fraternity—at least in the sentiment humanity; and if not in the sentiment humanity, then in justice, and if not in justice, then surely in science; and he cannot help knowing all the while that the conditions of his life are opposed to every principle of Christianity, humanity,justice and science. He affirms his faith in [the'prin- ciples of fraternity, humanity, justice, and political science, and yet the oppression of the working class is an indispensable factor in his daily life, and he constantly employs it to attain his own ends, in spite of his principles; and he not only lives in this manner, but he devotes all his energies to maintain a system which is directly opposed to all his beliefs. We are brothers, but every morning my brother or my sister performs for me the most menial offices. We are brothers, but I must have my morning cigar, my sugar, my mirror, or what not,—objects whose manufacture has often cost my brothers and...« less