The Journal of Leo Tolstoi [1897
I see a man in the mirror, hear his voice and am fully convinced that he is a real man; but I ap- proach, I want to grasp his hand and I touch the glass of the mirror and see my delusion. The same thing must come to pass in a dying man; a new feeling is born which discloses to him (through his new feeling and the new knowledge it gives him) the delusion of recognising his body as himself, and of all that he recognised as exist- ing through the means of the senses of this body.
So that the world is certainly not such as we know it to be: let there be other instruments of knowledge and there will be another world.
But no matter how that which we consider as the world, our attitude to the world, should change one thing is unalterably such as we know it and is always unchanging, it is that which knows. And it knows not only in me, but in everything which knows. This thing which knows is the same everywhere and in everything and in itself. It is God, and it is that for some reason limited particle of God which composes our actual " self."
But what then, is this God, i. e., something eter- nal, infinite, omnipotent, which has become mor- tal, finite, weak? Why did God divide himself within himself? I do not know, but I know that this is so, and that in this is life. All that we know is nothing else than just such divisions of
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