The conversation was about medicine. Tolstoi said:
“Medicine cannot possibly be called an ‘experimental’ science, for in medicine experiment in the strict sense is impossible. With experiments in chemistry a repetition of the more or less same conditions is possible, and so there can be approximately an exact conclusion as to the results. But in medicine there is no exact experiment nor can there be, for it is never possible to repeat the conditions that existed previously; if only because the individuality of the patient changes, and nearly, if not quite, everything changes in sympathy with that.”
Tolstoi related this episode from his childhood:
“We had a distant relation—an old woman Yakovlev. She lived in her own house in the Staro-Konyushenna Street in Moscow. She was a great miser, and, when she went to the country in the summer, she sent her children ahead in the luggage van. Once, when I was quite a small child, old Yakovlev came to pay us a visit. She sat with the grown-up people, and my brother Nikolenka got a box, put dolls into it, and began dragging it across the rooms. When he dragged it into the room where old Yakovlev sat, she asked him: ‘Nicolas, what have you got there?’ and he replied, ‘It is old Yakovlev going into the country, and her children are being sent ahead in the luggage van.’” ...
During the two days (the 6th and 7th August) of my stay in Yasnaya, Tolstoi wrote a perfectly new and very powerful story called Father and Daughter,[5] which, he said, “will stay as it is for the time being.” Tolstoi himself seems to be very well pleased with the story, and he thinks he may not have to alter it.
Tolstoi recalled the folk-story of “Vanka Kliushnik,” who asked before his execution to be allowed to sing a song; and Tolstoi was in raptures over the beauty of it.
Tolstoi is much amused because he is riding a young horse and training it. He is a great connoisseur of horses; he loves them and is a perfect horseman. He trains his horse to various paces. He showed me and Ilya Vasilevich how the horse started to gallop with the right leg. At the beginning of the ride I asked Tolstoi how to train a horse to start with this or that leg. Tolstoi explained to me how it was done, and then observed:
“Once a horse leads off with a certain leg, it wants to start with the same leg next time. In a man’s life, too, custom plays an enormous part. Once a certain habit is formed, a man unconsciously tries to act in accordance with it. It is very seldom that people act in accordance with reason, and only very remarkable people do so; usually people live and act by habit. How otherwise could it be possible that moral truths, announced so long ago by the great thinkers and admitted by most people, so rarely guide their actions? Very few people overcome the habits of animal life and oppose them by the convictions of reason.”