Page 1697 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

Chapter 9

These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker
or stronger from time to time, but never leaving him. He
read and thought, and the more he read and the more he
thought, the further he felt from the aim he was pursuing.
Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had
become convinced that he would find no solution in the
materialists, he had read and reread thoroughly Plato,
Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the
philosophers who gave a non-materialistic explanation of
life.
Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading
or was himself seeking arguments to refute other theories,
especially those of the materialists; but as soon as he began
to read or sought fat himself a solution of problems, the
same thing always happened. As long as he followed the
fixed definition of obscure words such as SPIRIT, WILL,
FREEDOM, ESSENCE, purposely letting himself go into
the snare of words the philosophers set for him, he seemed
to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the
artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to
what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with

1696 of 1759