Page 54 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

introducing him to the professor, went on with the
conversation.
A little man in spectacles, with a narrow forehead, tore
himself from the discussion for an instant to greet Levin,

and then went on talking without paying any further
attention to him. Levin sat down to wait till the professor
should go, but he soon began to get interested in the
subject under discussion.
Levin had come across the magazine articles about
which they were disputing, and had read them, interested
in them as a development of the first principles of science,
familiar to him as a natural science student at the
university. But he had never connected these scientific
deductions as to the origin of man as an animal, as to
reflex action, biology, and sociology, with those questions
as to the meaning of life and death to himself, which had
of late been more and more often in his mind.
As he listened to his brother’s argument with the
professor, he noticed that they connected these scientific
questions with those spiritual problems, that at times they
almost touched on the latter; but every time they were
close upon what seemed to him the chief point, they
promptly beat a hasty retreat, and plunged again into a sea
of subtle distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions,

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