III.
Thus I lived, abandoning myself to that insanity for six years longer, until my marriage. During that time I went abroad. My life in Europe and my associations with prominent men and scholars in Europe confirmed me even more in that faith of perfection in general, in which I was living, because I found the same faith in others. This faith assumed with me that customary form which it has with the majority of cultured people of our time. This faith was expressed by the word “progress.” At that time I thought that that word expressed something. I did not yet understand then that, tormented, like any live man, by the questions as to how to live in the best manner possible, I, by saying that I ought to do so in conformity with progress, was giving the same kind of an answer that a man might give, who, being borne in a bark by the waves and by the wind, to the one important question of whither to keep his course, should not reply to the question, but should say: “We are being borne somewhere.”
At that time I did not notice it. Only now and then, not my reason, but my feeling, revolted against that common superstition of our time, with which people veil from themselves the comprehension of life. Thus, during my stay in Paris, the sight of a capital punishment showed me the frailty of my superstition of progress. When I saw the head severed from the body, and both falling separately with a thud into a box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no
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