§6
It was The Chemist’s influence that made me choose the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Perhaps I should have done better to take up medicine; but it did me no great harm to acquire a partial knowledge of differential and integral equations, and then to lose it absolutely.
Without a knowledge of natural science, there is no salvation for the modern man. This wholesome food, this strict training of the mind by facts, this proximity to the life that surrounds ours, and this acknowledgement of its independence—without these there lurks somewhere in the soul a monastic cell, and this contains a germ of mysticism which may cover like a dark cloud the whole intellect.
Before I had gone through College, The Chemist had moved to Petersburg, and I did not meet him again till my return from exile. A few months after my marriage I paid a half-secret visit of a few days to my father, who was living near Moscow. He was still displeased at my marriage, and the purpose of my journey was to make peace between us once for all. I broke my journey at the village of Perkhushkov, the place where we had so often stayed in my youth. The Chemist was expecting me there; he even had dinner ready for me, and two bottles of champagne. Four or five years had made no change in him, except that he looked a little older. Before dinner he said to me quite seriously: “Please tell me frankly how marriage and domestic life strike you. Do you find it to your taste, or only passable?” I laughed, and he went on: “I am astonished at your boldness; no man in a normal condition could ever decide on so awful a step. More than one good match has been suggested to me; but when I think that a woman would do as she liked in my room, arranging everything in what she thinks order, forbidding me to smoke possibly, making a noise and talking nonsense, I feel such terror of the prospect that I prefer to die in solitude.”
“Shall I stop the night here or go on to my father’s?” I asked him after dinner.
“There is room enough in the house,” he answered, “but for your own sake I advise you to go on; you will get there by ten o’clock. Of course you know he’s still angry with you. Well, old people’s nerves are generally less active at night, before they get to sleep, and you will probably get a much better reception to-night than to-morrow morning; by then his spurs will be sharp for the fray.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” I laughed, “there is my old instructor in physiology and materialism! You remind me of those blissful days, when I used to come to you, like Wagner in Faust, to bore you with my idealism and to suffer, with some impatience, the cold water you threw on it.”
He laughed too and replied, “You have lived long enough, since then, to find out that all human actions depend merely on the nerves and chemical combination.”
Later, we somehow drifted apart; probably we were both to blame. Nevertheless, he wrote me a letter in 1846. I had published the first part of Whose Fault Is It?[[45]] and was beginning to be the fashion. He wrote that he was sorry to see me wasting my powers on trivial objects. “I made it up with you because of your letters on the study of Nature, in which you made me understand (as far as it is intelligible to the mind of man) the German philosophy. But why, instead of going on with serious work, do you write fairy tales?” I sent a few friendly words in reply, and there our relations ended.
[45]. A novel.