Yesterday I read Arkhangelsky’s[167] article “Whom to Serve” and was very delighted.
Have finished the notebook. And here I am writing from it:
1) My article on ... must be written for the people ...
2) (For The Notes of a Madman or for The Drama). Despair because of madness and wretchedness of life. Salvation from this despair in the recognition of God and one’s filiality to Him. The recognition of filiality is the recognition of brotherhood. The recognition of the brotherhood of man and the cruel, brutal, unbrotherly arrangement of life which is justified by people—leads inevitably to a recognition of one’s own insanity or that of the whole world.
3) I read Nakashidze’s[168] letter about the Congress of the Dukhobors, where they discussed social questions. Here is an instance of the possibility of administration without violence. One condition is necessary—no, two conditions: the respect of the youth and of the spiritually weak in general, to the resolutions of the elected elders, the spiritually stronger—the “little old men” as the Dukhobors call them; and the second condition that these “little old men” be rational and loving. At this Congress the question of uniting property (in common), was discussed and the “little old men” were in favour of it, but constantly repeated: “Only let there be no violence, let things be done voluntarily.”
Among the people and the Dukhobors this respect and recognition of the necessity of fulfilling the resolutions of the old men exist. And all this without forms; the election of the elders and the methods of agreement.
4) No matter how you grind a crystal, how you dissolve it, compress it, it will mould itself again at the first opportunity into the same form. And so the structure of society will be always the same, no matter to what changes you submit it. The form of a crystal will only then be changed when chemical changes occur in it, inner ones; the same with society.
5) It would be good to write a preface to Spier[169] containing the following:
The world is such as we see it, only if there do not exist any other beings differently built from us and endowed with other senses than ours. If we see not only the possibility, but the necessity, of the existence of other beings endowed with other senses than ours, then the world is in no case, merely such as we see it. Our imagination of the world shows only our attitude to the world, just as the visual picture which we form for ourselves from what we see as far as the horizon and the sky represents in no way the actual outlines of the objects seen. The other senses, hearing, smell, principally—touch, in verifying our visual impressions give us a more definite conception of the seen objects; but that which we know as broad, thick, hard or soft or how the things seen by us sound or smell, do not prove that we know these things fully and that if a new sense (above the five) were given us, it would not disclose to us that our conception of things formed by our five senses was not just as deceptive as that conception of the flatness of objects and their diminishing in perspective which sight only gives us.