We have now learnt to know the particular ideas which together constitute Tolstoism. As a philosophy it gives explanations of the world and of life, with unmeaning or contradictory paraphrases of some intentionally misunderstood Bible verses. As ethics, it prescribes the renunciation of resistance against vice and crime, the distribution of property, and the annihilation of mankind by complete abstinence. As sociological and economic doctrine it preaches the uselessness of science, the happiness of becoming stupid, the renunciation of manufactured products, and the duty of agriculture, though without betraying from whence the farmer is to get the necessary soil for cultivation. The remarkable thing in this system is, that it does not notice its own superfluity. If it understood itself, it would restrict itself to one single point--abstinence--since it is evident that it is unnecessary to break one’s head over the aim and import of human life, over crime and love of your neighbour, and particularly over country or town life, if in any case through abstinence humanity is to die out with the present generation.
Rod[172] denies that Tolstoi is a mystic. ‘Mysticism was always, as the word indicates, a transcendental doctrine. The mystics, especially the Christian mystics, have always sacrificed the present to the future life.... What, on the contrary, astonishes an unprejudiced mind in Tolstoi’s books is the almost complete absence of all metaphysics, his indifference to the so-called questions of the other world.’
Rod simply does not know what mysticism is. He unduly restricts the sense of the word, if he only uses it to mean the investigation of ‘other-world questions.’ If he were less superficial he would know that religious enthusiasm is only one special instance of a general mental condition, and that mysticism is any morbid obscuration and incoherence of thought which is accompanied by emotionalism, and therefore includes that thought, the fruit of which is the system at once Materialistic, Pantheistic Christian, Ascetic, Rousseauistic and Communistic, of Leo Tolstoi.
Raphael Löwenfeld, whom we have to thank for the first complete German edition of Tolstoi’s works, has also written a very commendable biography of the Russian novelist, yet in which he feels himself obliged, not only to take sides vehemently with his hero, but also to assure that hero’s possible critics beforehand of his deep contempt for them. ‘Want of comprehension,’ he says,[173] ‘calls them (the “independent phenomena” of Tolstoi’s sort) eccentrics, unwilling to allow that anyone should be a head taller than the rest. The unprejudiced man, who is capable of admiring greatness, sees in their independence the expression of an extraordinary power which has outgrown the possibilities of the time, and, leading on, points out the paths to those coming after.’ It is indeed hazardous forthwith to accuse all who are not of his opinion of ‘want of comprehension.’ One who judges so autocratically will have to put up with the answer, that he is guilty of ‘want of comprehension’ who, without the most elementary training, enters upon the criticism of a phenomenon, to the understanding of which some degree of æsthetical and literary so-called ‘knowledge’ and personal feeling are very far from sufficient. Löwenfeld boasts of his capacity to admire greatness. He is possibly wrong not to presuppose this capacity in others also. What he precisely has to prove is this, that what he admires deserves in truth the designation of greatness. His assertion, however, is the only proof he brings on this most important point. He calls himself unprejudiced. It may be admitted that he is free from prejudices, but then he is free also from the preliminary knowledge that alone entitles anyone to form an opinion on psychological phenomena, which strike even the uninitiated as extraordinary, and to present them with self-assurance. Did he possess this preliminary knowledge he would know that Tolstoi, who, ‘leading, is to point out the paths to those coming after,’ is a mere copy of a class of men who have had their representatives in every age. Lombroso[174] instances a certain Knudsen, a madman, who lived in Schleswig about 1680, and asserted that there was neither a God nor a hell; that priests and judges were useless and pernicious, and marriage an immorality; that men ceased to exist after death; that everyone must be guided by his own inward insight,’ etc. Here we have the principal features of Tolstoi’s cosmology and moral philosophy. Knudsen has, however, so little ‘pointed out, leading, the way to those coming after,’ that he still only exists as an instructive case of mental aberration in books on diseases of the mind.