1) A servant makes life false and corrupt. As soon as you have servants, then you increase your wants, complicate life and make it a burden. Instead of joy when you do things yourself, you have vexation and the principal thing, you renounce the main duty of life; the fulfilment of the brotherhood of man.
2) The æsthetic and the ethical are two arms of one lever: to the extent that you lengthen and lighten one side, to that extent you shorten and make heavier the other side. As soon as a man loses his moral sense, he becomes particularly responsive to the æsthetic.
3) People know two Gods: one whom they want to force to serve them, demanding from him by prayers the fulfilment of their desires, and another God, one whom we ought to serve, to the fulfilment of whose will, all our desires ought to be directed.
4) It is a common phenomenon that old people love to travel, to go far and to change places. Is it not a foreseeing and a readiness for the last journey?
Aug. 15. Y. P.
I am continuing to work. Am advancing.
Lombroso was here—a limited, naïve little old man. The Maklakovs. Leo arrived with his wife.[216] Boulanger—a nice man. Wrote letters to everybody: Posha and Ivan Michailovich and Van-der-Veer. The oppressive Leontev[217] was here.
There was something I wanted to write very much, but have forgotten....
A revolting report concerning the missionary congress in Kazan.[218]
There is noted: “Woman’s character”—and I remember that it was something very good. Now I have forgotten. It seems to me that it was that the peculiarity of woman’s character is that her feeling alone guides her life, and that reason only serves her feeling. She cannot even understand that feeling can be made subservient to reason.