These doubts fretted and harassed
him, growing weaker or stronger from time to time,
but never leaving him.  He read and thought,
and the more he read and the more he thought, the further
he felt from the aim he was pursuing.

Of late in Moscow and in the country,
since he had become convinced that he would find no
solution in the materialists, he had read and re-read
thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Hegel,
and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a non-materialistic
explanation of life.

Their ideas seemed to him fruitful
when he was reading or was himself seeking arguments
to refute other theories, especially those of the
materialists; but as soon as he began to read or sought
for himself a solution of problems, the same thing
always happened.  As long as he followed the
fixed definition of obscure words such as spirit,
will, freedom, essence, purposely letting himself
go into the snare of words the philosophers set for
him, he seemed to comprehend something.  But
he had only to forget the artificial train of reasoning,
and to turn from life itself to what had satisfied
him while thinking in accordance with the fixed definitions,
and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces at
once like a house of cards, and it became clear that
the edifice had been built up out of those transposed
words, apart from anything in life more important
than reason.

At one time, reading Schopenhauer,
he put in place of his will the word love,
and for a couple of days this new philosophy charmed
him, till he removed a little away from it.  But
then, when he turned from life itself to glance at
it again, it fell away too, and proved to be the same
muslin garment with no warmth in it.

His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised
him to read the theological works of Homiakov. 
Levin read the second volume of Homiakov’s
works, and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative
style which at first repelled him, he was impressed
by the doctrine of the church he found in them. 
He was struck at first by the idea that the apprehension
of divine truths had not been vouchsafed to man, but
to a corporation of men bound together by love ­to
the church.  What delighted him was the thought
how much easier it was to believe in a still existing
living church, embracing all the beliefs of men, and
having God at its head, and therefore holy and infallible,
and from it to accept the faith in God, in the creation,
the fall, the redemption, than to begin with God,
a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. 
But afterwards, on reading a Catholic writer’s
history of the church, and then a Greek orthodox writer’s
history of the church, and seeing that the two churches,
in their very conception infallible, each deny the
authority of the other, Homiakov’s doctrine
of the church lost all its charm for him, and this
edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers’
edifices.

All that spring he was not himself,
and went through fearful moments of horror.

“Without knowing what I am and
why I am here, life’s impossible; and that I
can’t know, and so I can’t live,”
Levin said to himself.

“In infinite time, in infinite
matter, in infinite space, is formed a bubble-organism,
and that bubble lasts a while and bursts, and that
bubble is Me.”

It was an agonizing error, but it
was the sole logical result of ages of human thought
in that direction.

This was the ultimate belief on which
all the systems elaborated by human thought in almost
all their ramifications rested.  It was the prevalent
conviction, and of all other explanations Levin had
unconsciously, not knowing when or how, chosen it,
as anyway the clearest, and made it his own.

But it was not merely a falsehood,
it was the cruel jeer of some wicked power, some evil,
hateful power, to whom one could not submit.

He must escape from this power. 
And the means of escape every man had in his own
hands.  He had but to cut short this dependence
on evil.  And there was one means ­death.

And Levin, a happy father and husband,
in perfect health, was several times so near suicide
that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted
to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his
gun for fear of shooting himself.

But Levin did not shoot himself, and
did not hang himself; he went on living.