Among the countless thoughts and fancies which pass, without logic or
sequence, through the mind and the imagination, there are always some
which leave behind them a mark so profound that, without remembering
their exact subject, we can at least recall that something good has
passed through our brain, and try to retain and reproduce its effect.
Such was the mark left upon my consciousness by the idea of sacrificing
my feelings to Masha's happiness, seeing that she believed that she
could attain it only through a union with Basil.




XIX. BOYHOOD

PERHAPS people will scarcely believe me when I tell them what were the
dearest, most constant, objects of my reflections during my boyhood, so
little did those objects consort with my age and position. Yet, in my
opinion, contrast between a man's actual position and his moral activity
constitutes the most reliable sign of his genuineness.

During the period when I was leading a solitary and self-centred moral
life, I was much taken up with abstract thoughts on man's destiny, on
a future life, and on the immortality of the soul, and, with all the
ardour of inexperience, strove to make my youthful intellect solve those
questions--the questions which constitute the highest level of thought
to which the human intellect can tend, but a final decision of which the
human intellect can never succeed in attaining.

I believe the intellect to take the same course of development in the
individual as in the mass, as also that the thoughts which serve as