Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
No amount of reasoning can reduce the spiritual to the material and explain how the spiritual originates from the material.
A human being considers himself to be both his body and his soul. But he only cares about his body, especially when he is young. And meanwhile, the main thing in a human being is not the body, but the soul. And that is why it is not the body that you should care more about, but the soul. Get used to this, recall more often that your life is in your soul, protect it from all the everyday filth, do not let the body suppress it, subordinate the body to the soul—do this and you will fulfill your purpose and live a happy life.
— After Marcus Aurelius
It all comes down to this: do we believe that the soul is real? In spiritual terms, people are divided into the living and the dead, i.e. believers and non-believers.
A non-believer says: “What soul are you talking about? The things I eat and enjoy—that’s what’s mine!” And, without thinking too much, he cares only about what is external as he commits his corporeal and evil deeds, lies, exalts himself, grovels before others, and does not feel within himself the higher needs of freedom, truth and love. Such a person is buried from the light of reason because he is dead and because the light only gives life to the living, but the dead it dries and decays.
Belief in the reality of spiritual life gives human thought a different direction.
The one who believes in spiritual life turns his attention inward, strives to make sense of his feelings and his thoughts, strives to direct his life in accord with higher needs: to make it free, truthful and loving; strives to act in such a way that his life would be composed of thoughts and feelings that are most consistent with the aims of goodness. Such a person seeks the truth and reaches for the light, because the life of the soul is impossible without the light of reason, just as the life of the visible world is impossible without the light of the sun.
Among the people there are no perfect dwellers of darkness, nor perfect dwellers of light, everyone is at a crossroads, and, having the power to go, everyone goes this way and that. And everyone who believes in the reality of the soul, who lives under the light of reason, dwells in the kingdom of God and possesses eternal life.
— Buka
Let the scientists and philosophers come up with their determinisms, their laws of motion, let them think that the world is a product of a series of accidents. I see in the world a unity of design, which, despite their assertions, forces me to accept a single origin. It would be the same thing for them to tell me that the Iliad was composed by randomly scattering the letters of a typeface. To this I would not hesitate to reply: that is not true, even though I have no other reason to believe it except for my being unable to believe it.
“It is all superstition,” say the scientists. Perhaps it is superstition, I reply, and yet what can your unclear reason do against a more convincing superstition?
You say: “There are no two origins, the spiritual and the material.” I say that there is nothing in common between my thought and a tree.
And what is most amusing of all is that they defeat each other with their sophisms and would sooner assign a soul to a rock than accept its existence in a human being.
— Rousseau
I do not know whether a dog can choose, remember, love, fear, imagine or think; so when they tell me that all these things in it are not passions, not feelings, but natural and necessary workings of its organism, which is composed of different combinations of particles of matter, I can agree with this opinion. But I think, and I know that I think. What can be in common between that which thinks and some other combination of particles of matter, i.e. space that is divisible in all its dimensions—length, width and depth?
— La Bruyere
If everything is merely matter and if the thoughts in me, as in all human beings, are merely the result of combinations of particles of matter, then who in the world came up with the notion of any kind of beings besides those that are material? How can matter be the reason for something that denies it and excludes it from its own existence? How can this be the thing that thinks in a human being, that is, the thing that acts to persuade a human being that he is not matter?
— La Bruyere
Metaphysics really exists, if not as a science, then as a natural inclination, because human reason, moving inexorably forward, driven not only by a haughty desire for knowledge, but by necessity, arrives at questions that cannot be answered by any practical activity of reason and its derived fundamentals. Thus, everyone whose reason had expanded to the point of speculation had always had some form of metaphysics; and they will always have it.
— Kant
The difference between the spiritual and the material is as clear to the simplest mind of a child as it is to the deepest mind of a sage. Reasonings and arguments about the spiritual and the material are pointless. These reasonings will not explain anything and will only darken that which is clear and indisputable.