Anna Karenina

He had heard that women often love unattractive, simple people, but he did not believe it, because he judged by himself, and he could only love beautiful, mysterious and special women.

Yet, after spending two months alone in the country, he became convinced that this was not one of those loves he had experienced in his early youth; that this feeling would not leave him a moment’s peace; that he could not live without resolving the question whether she would or would not be his wife; and that his despair came only from his imagination - he had no proof that he would be refused. And now he had come to Moscow with the firm determination to propose and to marry if he was accepted. Or ... but he could not think what would become of him if he were refused.

VII

Arriving in Moscow on the morning train, Levin had gone to stay with his older half-brother Koznyshev and, after changing, entered his study, intending to tell him at once what he had come for and to ask his advice; but his brother was not alone. With him was a well-known professor of philosophy, who had actually come from Kharkov to resolve a misunderstanding that had arisen between them on a rather important philosophical question. The professor was engaged in heated polemics with the materialists. Sergei Koznyshev had followed these polemics with interest and, after reading the professor’s last article, had written him a letter with his objections; he had reproached the professor with making rather large concessions to the materialists. And the professor had come at once to talk it over. The discussion was about a fashionable question: is there a borderline between psychological and physiological phenomena in human activity, and where does it lie?¹²

Sergei Ivanovich met his brother with the benignly cool smile he gave to everyone and, after introducing him to the professor, went on with the conversation.

The small, yellow-skinned man in spectacles, with a narrow brow, turned away from the conversation for a moment to greet Levin and, paying no further attention to him, went on talking. Levin sat down to wait until the professor left, but soon became interested in the subject of the conversation.

Levin had come across the articles they were discussing in magazines, and had read them, being interested in them as a development of the bases of natural science, familiar to him from his studies at the university, but he had never brought together these scientific conclusions about the animal origin of man,¹³ about reflexes, biology and sociology, with those questions about the meaning of life and death which lately had been coming more and more often to his mind.

Listening to his brother’s conversation with the professor, he noticed that they connected the scientific questions with the inner, spiritual ones, several times almost touched upon them, but that each time they came close to what seemed to him the most important thing, they hastily retreated and again dug deeper into the realm of fine distinctions, reservations, quotations, allusions, references to authorities, and he had difficulty understanding what they were talking about.

‘I cannot allow,’ Sergei Ivanovich said with his usual clarity and precision of expression and elegance of diction, ‘I can by no means agree with Keiss that my whole notion of the external world stems from sense impressions. The fundamental concept of being itself is not received through the senses, for there exists no special organ for conveying that concept.’

‘Yes, but they - Wurst and Knaust and Pripasov -¹⁴ will reply to you that your consciousness of being comes from the totality of your sense impressions, that this consciousness of being is the result of sensations. Wurst even says directly that where there are no sensations, there is no concept of being.’

‘I would say the reverse,’ Sergei Ivanovich began ...

But here again it seemed to Levin that, having approached the most important thing, they were once more moving away, and he decided to put a question to the professor.

‘Therefore, if my senses are destroyed, if my body dies, there can be no further existence?’ he asked.

The professor, vexed and as if mentally pained by the interruption, turned to the strange questioner, who looked more like a barge-hauler than a philosopher, then shifted his gaze to Sergei Ivanovich as if to ask: what can one say to that? But Sergei Ivanovich, who spoke with far less strain and one-sidedness than the professor, and in whose head there still remained room enough both for responding to the professor and for understanding the simple and natural point of view from which the question had been put, smiled and said:

‘That question we still have no right to answer ...’

‘We have no data,’ the professor confirmed and went on with his arguments. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I will point out that if, as Pripasov states directly, sensation does have its basis in impression, we must distinguish strictly between these two concepts.’