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Suicide and philosophy

Foreword

This article was written in 1907 for the collection "Suicide".

The post-revolutionary reaction multiplied the number of suicides, this caused alarm and gave impetus to the creation of a collection. The thoughts expressed in the article can now be repeated not without benefit, so I agreed to publish it in a real almanac.

But recently I published in Krasnaya Gazeta a new article, " A Few Thoughts on Suicide ," which is quite up-to-date. Therefore, I asked the editors of the almanac to place this new article next to the article of 1907.

They coincide fundamentally, but complement each other.

A. Lunacharsky

The behavior of people is very rarely determined entirely by philosophical considerations and worldview. Fichte has already noted that it is more likely for individuals—we will say the same about groups and classes—to choose a philosophical system according to their shoulder and character than this latter determines the character and line of action of a person or group. But not only is philosophy compliant in the sense that every young man will find in its immensely rich world the truth according to his own model, but once chosen, even in those cases when the owner cherishes and pampers her, develops and appreciates, she does not have a loud enough voice in the council of human motives, where active decisions and plans are made, where directives are given to the executing will.

Who has not repeated that human actions are determined by feelings, interests, and not by abstract ideas?

However, this truth must also be accepted with a certain limitation. Philosophical beliefs still have their value. And even more so, it may be that everyone chooses or develops philosophy in accordance with his character, his fate, his social position, his era.

Butti has recently made an attempt in his drama "Castello del Sogno" ("The Castle of Sleep") to portray in the form of personal clashes of symbolic characters the internal conflicts of the human soul. An interesting attempt that will probably find imitators.

Entering for a moment on the path indicated by the Milanese poet, we imagine philosophy as a noble housekeeper from distant, very distant northern countries. She is majestic, but pale, almost bloodless. She speaks categorically and commandingly, but in a little-known language, and she is not very listened to.

She is surrounded by badges of honor and taken out of the inner chambers in royal attire, when it is necessary to magnificently receive foreign ambassadors. With this latter, she appears to be the real mistress of the castle. But in fact, the gentlemen are those swarthy, full-blooded, fussy inhabitants who noisily chat at their gatherings, are sometimes ready to grab knives and make often contradictory decisions.

Nevertheless, the unearthly songs resounding from the high tower of the castlemaid, her strange stories, her inexorable, though unfulfilled decrees live right next to her and are not completely alien. After all, the owners of the castle in their youth circled the world before they found a beauty to their liking.

In solemn, tragic moments, when life comes into contact with death, when the castle is besieged from all sides by evil forces, when lead chutes are poured onto bullets, in a large hall flooded with blood, the wounded moan incessantly, when hunger looks from pale faces, and menacingly laughs out the windows. a wild glow, - on such days the housekeeper majestically descends from her chamber and all oppressed forces listen to her teachings with unprecedented attention. And, perhaps, she, the daughter of warlike peoples, like Krimgilda, in a cloak of her northern hair, sending cold lightning through the eyes of the heroine, will call everyone to the last effort and teach life itself to count as nothing when it is not adorned with the consciousness of the victory of the spirit, or bought at a price. his humiliation; perhaps she will turn death itself with weapons in her hands into a magnificent celebration of human pride; maybe with this sermon she will bring victory to the population of the castle.

But something else may happen: she will descend in mourning, in a monastic cassock, with her head strewn with ashes, and will cry and kill herself, and will repeat her terrible judgments about the world and life with unprecedented force until now, and will say that resistance is useless, that in the future only a tedious struggle awaits everyone, wounds, hardships, humiliations, and in the end - inexorable death. She, too, will call for courage, but courage of a different kind, she will place the torch of suicide in the hands of the most desperate and shed tears, she will lead him in a funeral procession to the powder magazines in order to extract the devourer-death from there.

In each of us, in the interweaving of forces, in the choir of voices, the world outlook worked out by our thought also takes its place. In the last minutes, in moments of the highest tension, we also turn to our common worldview. And it tells us either "yes" or "no", reinforcing or weakening the last decisions.

Suicide is mostly the result of difficult external circumstances and hereditary, rarely acquired defects, or, say, "features" of the nervous system. Nevertheless, analyzing any suicide, we will find in it a moment when a person asks himself: - And what is life in general? What is this strange world? With these words he invokes philosophy, and she, the philosophy familiar to him, the existence of which he, perhaps, did not assume in himself, usually gives him his decisive answer very quickly, now pushing him into the coffin, now holding him on the edge of the grave.

The question of suicide and the question of worldview are fatally related. There are worldviews that logically lead to suicide, so that it is absent only because of external, extraneous thought reasons. And suicides very, very often, as we know from thousands of suicide letters, take on the character of an acutely negative worldview, a kind of act of philosophical protest.

* * *

Looking closely at the philosophical experiences of our time, we notice that in it, to the fullest expression, a majestic process of its kind has reached, which is quite aptly called the purification of the worldview from anthropocentrism.

It would seem that with the growth of culture, human pride should also grow? Where is there to anthropocentrism, it would seem, a savage, worshiping both a tiger and a crocodile, making his fate dependent on a stone or a painted block of wood, a naked, hungry, frightened savage, looking with horror at the terrible forces of tropical nature, every minute ready to grind him? Couldn't some Kant, sometimes walking at night through the streets of Koenigsberg, and raising his eyes to the stars, say: "There are two great miracles in nature - the starry sky above us and the moral law within us?"

And is there only one moral law? After all, we are now perfectly armed, we have conquered steam and electricity, we ourselves have created giants with our hands and brains, slavishly obeying us and before whom our ancestor could only tremble. With our thought we penetrated into the abyss of space and time. From our dream, we have extracted works of art that fill our souls with pride and tenderness, and yet, the further we go, the more we refuse to put the human in the center of the world.

This trembling savage, praying to thunder and storm, by his very prayer professed the idea that both thunder and storm are human-like, that they are huge people who can be angry, but also listen to prayers. The whole world seemed to him a stream of humanoid wills. They could be evil, but they are native, and their motives are approximately the same as mine and yours.

And when this worldview was systematized and took on complete forms, a person was able to look contemptuously at thunders and storms, at all the power of clumsy and heartless matter. For he knew that she was nothing in the face of the Great Spirit, who, by one condition of his infinite will, could destroy and recreate her. This spirit, the king, monstrously surpassing in grandeur the great earthly kingdom, is the father of people, close to them, has their image and likeness. Such an idea, such an illusion, made existence not terrible, even in the toothy jaws of hell, as Carlyle put it.

But time passed, and people became stronger, and God - further. It has already been said that prayers do not reach God, for he is too wise and great for his decisions to conform to the prayers of an insignificant worm. His ways are inscrutable. What is good in our eyes can be evil for him, it is not for us to judge him, but let his will be done. God has been exalted and dehumanised.

And there came theism and likened the universe to a beautiful clockwork. The wiser the master, the less the mechanism he built needs his further care. God rested in the endless Sabbath, and on Friday the finished world lives on its own, going its own way. Is man central in it? Was this world created for man? More and more people doubt it. Pantheism is unfolding more and more invincibly, saying: "God is all one." But it's not human at all. Man himself is only an insignificant part of "everything". Is it central? No. Already in Spinoza's system, in this ocean, each drop of which suddenly opens before you into a new ocean, man is drowning, annihilated. Pantheism is faith in "God-Nature", the very one about which poets say that she is "indifferent, shines with eternal beauty" before human sorrows.

True, mankind did not immediately come to the conclusion about the absolute indifference of nature. The stern materialist Holbach, whose book seemed so depressingly gray to the Spinozist Goethe, still writes the word "nature" with a capital letter and, confident in the inflexibility of its laws, at the same time believes in its initial rationality and goodness.

Recall Turgenev's image of nature - a titan woman in a green dress, who in a metallic voice broadcasts that a person and a flea are equally dear to her. This green-robed goddess is still a kind mother compared to the current idea of nature. Nothing can be dear to our nature - neither a person nor a flea. Strictly speaking, it does not exist at all, because it has no central consciousness, it does not feel anything, it is a mere conglomeration of forces. But the most deadly thing about it is its regularity, because there is no contract and no legislator, there are only slaves. Each being in its origin, development and disappearance is mathematically strictly dependent on its environment. It has received everything from her, everything is dictated to it by her. But the whole whole is made up of such slavish parts, everything is blindly, absurdly crowded together, mutually enslaved, fettered by chains of faceless fatality.

What about consciousness? “Consciousness, will, feeling are all illusions. Here is the end of the great process of dying of anthropocentrism. Such priests of pure atheism as the biologist Felix Le Dantec teach us that we have not yet sufficiently understood our contingency, our passivity. It still seems to us that consciousness plays a role in world processes, or at least in our own existence. Nothing happened: looking for reasons for one or another of our actions, a biologist, according to complete materialism, can completely ignore our consciousness, because mechanical and chemical reasons will be quite enough for him to explain any of your actions, which in the end completely decomposes into chemical and physical processes. (reflexes). There is no activity - there are only processes, and each of them follows from previous processes, and it is impossible to find any role for consciousness in this chain of fatal transformations. Is it worth repeating that free will is the purest self-deception? And the feeling? This is a terrible gift of fate! If we did not know that fate is only a word, under which the irresponsible power of unorganized forces is hidden, then we could rightfully call her a devil. In fact, let your muscles tear, blood flow, howling mouths open, bodies writhe, according to mechanical and chemical laws - what if there is no feeling of suffering? They say that Descartes mercilessly beat his dogs with pleasure while repeating: "They are automatons and do not feel pain, but they are made so wisely that their behavior completely coincides with the behavior of sentient beings." The statue of Laocoön does not suffer. Without feeling, the world would be a statue of Laocoön. His face would express pain, the beautiful would perish in the loops of the ugly, but there would be no flour itself, and nothing would change in mathematical equations. Meanwhile, the terrible music of feeling is attached to the cinematography of being, accompanying its every manifestation. Since in the world of feelings suffering, according to the recognition of the vast majority, greatly prevails, and in proportion to this we are not able to change anything, because we cannot move, but we are driven by chaos - Du glaubst zu schieben und du wirst geschoben,1 - then it remains only "respectfully return the ticket."2 To whom only? You won't find a director. Return it to the void and plunge into chaos yourself? How did it happen that such a terrible worldview matured along with the victories of man over nature.

Materialism is above all an expression of the attitude of the artisan classes towards the world. The city of artisans and merchants is its bearer. Going against the fatalism of capricious deities, in whom the farmer who depends on the changing elements naturally believes, the new man of the machine tool, the workshop, begins to pursue the idea of ​​the regularity of all phenomena. So it was at the dawn of Greek civilization, and so it was at the dawn of modern civilization. Bacon, not being a complete materialist, nevertheless outlined the task of this philosophy most clearly: "When we recognize nature in its laws, we will become its masters."

Man wanted to become the master of nature and for this he decided to know it to the bottom, as a huge workshop full of complex precision machines. "Nature is not a temple, but a workshop." But, walking among his newly discovered and well-accounted mechanisms, a man suddenly noticed with horror that he himself is a soulless automaton, that there is no master in the workshop, but only mutually determined mechanical and chemical processes, and he himself is only processes and processes. What about my consciousness? - An epiphenomenon that would be better done if it stopped uselessly jumping over a reality that not a single hair can change. What about my will? “An absurd illusion: if a falling stone could feel, it would imagine that it wants to fall. 3What about my feeling? - It grimaces and laughs, there is an abyss of deceit here. It is here to torment you. A man turns around helplessly in his workshop. This is bullying, this is torture. But in any case, I can stop it whenever I want. But the mathematical formulas from the walls answer: "both your rebellion and your suicide are only processes determined without a trace by other processes for thousands and thousands of years."

We have already said that materialistic pessimism in itself does not inevitably lead to suicide, although, according to the same Le Dantec, it logically leads to it. Vital endurance, strong bonds of instinct, an accidental confluence of circumstances that gave pleasure in a favorable proportion - all this can keep the idea of ​​​​suicide far from modern man. But in any case, a bleak philosophy does its job, providing not a support in life, but a slow-acting poison.

Many would like to seek salvation from this misfortune in returning back to the old religious views. But reality shows that this remedy is not suitable. The heavy hammer of science crushes clay idols.

Suicide is determined by the characteristics of our social order. Mass suicides in Russia are features of our Russian life. 4 I do not touch this side of the issue. I only point to an accomplice in this terrible calamity—bourgeois pessimistic materialism, much more prevalent in our age than many people think. And all the more we can consider ourselves entitled to do this, since we ourselves adhere to a world outlook, materialistic from beginning to end. But at the same time, this outlook on the world is dialectical naturalism, of which Marx was the greatest representative, in no way contradicting the positive sciences, just as heaven differs from earth from the passive pessimism of modern ecclesiasts, and can no longer play the role of a force condoning the tendency to suicide.

However, I would like to emphasize more than one pessimistic materialism that has permeated modern culture, often quite unconsciously being a deep conviction, a basic truth in the eyes of millions of people. I know that millions of people, becoming frank with themselves or others in a bitter moment, exclaim: "For that matter, what is life itself?" — and burst into materialistic confession of faith. I would like to note, however, another side, which is characteristic of the walking, typical of our time, life assessment.

To do this, I want to make a small comparison between the suicides of ours and the ancient world, between the pessimists of ours and the Buddhist world.

It is known that historical philosophy, which widely captured the best people of the era of the decline of ancient culture, symbolically represented by the emperor Marcus Aurelius and the slave Epictetus, justified suicide and greatly contributed to such an exit from being.

But look closely at the very foundations of the historical worldview. This school believes, it is true, in an unshakable and superhuman order of the universe, but it believes just as unshakably in the basic benevolence of nature. Human life is full of sorrows. But this is an accidental deviation from the great harmony of the rest of nature, human life is a necessary, albeit full of suffering, stage of being, a dissonance that is resolved without a trace in world harmony. A sufferer-man can rest from grave personal experiences, looking into the face of nature, sometimes majestic, sometimes sweet, knowing the beautiful system of its harmonious laws, ascending with his soul to the top of the universe, merging in a kind of ecstasy with the infinite "Soul of the World". Spinoza's "Amor Dei intellectualis" is already ready here. fiveThus strengthening his individual soul by Antaeus's touch on the maternal soil of the universal, the Stoic at the same time weakened the influence of the petty, annoying and painful disorder of the earthly turmoil on his psyche, protecting himself with the armor of ataraxia, i.e. philosophical indifference, passing by adversity with a raised look to the sky, and sometimes with convulsively clenched teeth.

In some museums - the best in Naples - you can admire the marble head of the Stoic Zeno. It is impossible to think of a better expression of the world-assessment that we have briefly outlined. First of all, the amazing symmetry of this head, from which emanates geometry, a strictly calculated proportion, as if the body and soul of this person are saturated with mathematical regularity. But this face is also ascetically thin, and two tense mournful folds of a high forehead stand out with terrible force, like two frozen waves, forming an acute angle between the eyebrows. It is felt that a person is accustomed, as to a normal state, to the tension of all spiritual forces in order to preserve his majestic peace. This is not the peace of bliss that diffuses into the environment; it is not the rest of a force confident in itself; it is the rest of the besieged camp, knowing that a strong guard does not sleep and vigilantly looks into the hostile darkness. Such is the stoic militant ataraxia.

But when the little things of life ate through the silver armor, when the senseless, but cunning inventiveness of inexhaustible vulgarity, the "spirit of the earth" posed the dilemma to the philosopher to live at the cost of humiliation or not to live, Stoic philosophy taught: die. Dying, the Stoics sighed with relief. They allowed themselves to die, weighing all the circumstances. Placed by nature on a difficult post, they could finally say to themselves: "I have the right to change." They did not look at death as annihilation, but as a return to an easier, happier, more harmonious existence. Their body went to the four elements, from which it was taken, and the spark of reason was absorbed by the fiery ocean of the "universal soul." The principle of individuality was for them a source of suffering, a heavy burden that they carried only out of a sense of duty to the supreme order,

This is clear. The Greek is accustomed to live the life of his community, his <Greek. word>. 7 One historical blow after another has fractured the community and left the individual to itself. The questions of life and death, which have always worried the Aryan soul, seemed infinitely more terrible when they came close to the small personality, no longer protected by the collective. In Stoic philosophy, the Hellenic tried to find a new homeland, instead of the lost one, a new "cosmos", a part of which he could feel himself. That is why in Stoicism we see both elements of sharp individualism and majestic universalism.

Nothing like it now. Who among truly thinking people believes in our time in an objective moral order inherent in nature itself? For the vast majority of educated people, their nature is an indifferent machine. And therefore - live while it is pleasant, and if it becomes difficult - return to the realm of unorganized matter, where being, however, continues, but consciousness disappears.

As for Buddhism in its pure form, its whole essence is aimed at proving that even the meager joys of being are pure illusions, that sorrow is the basis of life.

Fear of the world is the beginning of wisdom for a Buddhist. And then there are metaphysical constructs that point out the practical path for an expedient escape from the world.

But isn't it easier? Is it worth inventing metaphysical outcomes when the outcome is at hand: suicide?

But no, a Buddhist does not consider suicide an outcome. No matter how disdainfully he treats reality, it is nevertheless for him a kind of grandiose whole, closely connected by the unity of the moral law. The Buddhist does not believe that my existence with this body, this character, this mind, these actions and this fate is the result of chance. No, all this has complex chains of causes.

And since a Buddhist is a moralist, and not a physicist, he is also looking for moral reasons: all my “I” and his fate are rewards and punishments for behavior in past existences. How is it possible that this thread, lost in the infinite past, could be suddenly and finally cut off with one simple movement? It's incredible; suicide will only count as a new guilt and will cast its bloody shadow on subsequent existences. Schopenhauer also expresses this thought more subtly. But generally speaking, the idea of ​​the moral monism of the universe as a result of a kind of automatic judgment of each individual, the automatic law of Karma, is alien to European thought.

In the famous monologue of Hamlet we find a certain shadow of such a thought, namely a shadow. Hamlet is no longer sure that death does not stop the thread of being, but is only a kind of knot on it. Another thing stops him: maybe the soul with death plunges into a deep sleep, this lower form of life. But does it still admit the possibility of dreams? Wouldn't they be too painful?

How characteristic: the ancient Asians have an objective fabric of deeds and rewards, the greatest poet of the dawn of modern times, the poet whom Carlyle proclaims the true representative of Protestant Christianity, has only a personality, a self-contained "I", I - in a coffin, inhabiting six boards with its painful creations , fantasies of a decaying brain.

But modern bourgeois materialism, the current one formulated by Vladimir Solovyov, is much more categorical. First of all, the world for the new philosophy is not a moral, but only a physical unity. In this sense, we know better than Buddhists that not a single grain of our body, not a single wave of energy that has passed through our body, can be lost in the universe. But do we want to kill our physics by crushing our own skull with a revolver? It would be meaningless - physics is immortal. No, we want to kill our psyche. Oh, it is only an epiphenomenon, it is only a fleeting flame flaring up above highly organized matter - the brain. It is impossible to destroy matter, but it is possible to destroy its organization, and at the same time blow out the fleeting flame that we are tired of. I, as a body, is connected with the physical universe with millions of threads, but what is my spiritual "I" ? He has no place in it. The weight of the universe and its energy equations will not fluctuate one iota from the disappearance without a trace of even the entire consciousness of the world. The current suicide in the vast majority of cases is calm: what is the reward? what kind of dreams are there? Simple - decomposition, simple - black soil, simple - burdock will grow.8 Only atavism explains that some, feeling the chill of the trunk at their temples, are overwhelmed with a sweet sense of revenge. "Here, they say, to you: you Someone in gray chained me to this nonsense of life, others drag their chains, and I tear them."

Bourgeois materialism and bourgeois individualism, taken together, create this disgusting nihilism which is the inner conviction and lifeblood of bourgeois culture.

It doesn't mean anything that the bourgeois cultural tregers are trying to fight it, preparing arguments for decayed religiosity. The mere fact that such cunning sophists as, for example, James or Boutre have to resort to crude logical cheating and, retreating from the outposts conquered by science, go back to completely obsolete forms of religious thought, serves as proof that bourgeois culture itself is not can create antidotes to the poison of petty-bourgeois nihilism raging in it.

New forms of thought, resulting from the combination of the life experience of the new 10 classes, full of "practical idealism", with the data of the latest science and scientific philosophy, can only take root in a new humanity, the elements of which are growing around us. This new outlook on the world can serve as an enormously important support in the struggle for existence.

She threw on a scarf and, stealthily, went,

Slipped between door and wall

She slipped into the side alley

And she disappeared. Darkness will bury her from people.

Went to die. The river is near

The high bank rose hunchbacked:

Jump and splash and foam and somewhere

Umchit. Peace to the spirit - the body will be thrown out by the river.

With such a dream in the night she hurries

Blind, stupid. And the wind is crying

The cold rain is falling… What does that mean?

Stopped suddenly as if smitten ...

All sank down and strains hearing.

The womb has spoken. But without sound:

From the depths, trembling, flour rose,

Like an eternal word, exciting a sensitive spirit.

And the woman is a mother. She has been transformed!

She is only a form of young new life,

An element that is loving and harsh

For eternity, he keeps a treasure of a new link.

And the spell of the pool has no power over her,

And the burden of life no longer frightens:

She goes back - mother, mother! meets

The suburb is mournful. Everything seems familiar.

The poem we read is one of the last works of Ada Negri. In Italian, it sounds, of course, more beautiful. But to me it is important for its content. Not even by the immediate, material content, but by its symbolic meaning, which, perhaps, was not at all foreseen by the poetess herself.

Here motherhood saves from suicide. But motherhood in itself is a great symbol of the fecundity of life in general, its growth and development, a symbol of the denial of everything that is barren, self-sufficient, terry or withered. Whose consciousness felt in itself the trembling of a new emerging life, emanating with all its fibers from its being and at the same time completely new and having the right and strength for a long, fresh, more powerful existence, whose consciousness felt itself to be a form of "young new life", and sternly guarding the embryo, perhaps, of an infinitely important and rich chain of phenomena - he is, of course, secured and insured against the tempting demon of suicide.

A person who feels creative power in himself will simply never believe that he is an automaton and part of an automaton. All the intricacies that are so useful in establishing the laws of physical nature, so powerfully encroaching in their reverse action to overwhelm the author himself, his person, with complex loops, are invalid and harmless before the direct consciousness of oneself as a force among other forces. "Cogito ergo sum", said Descartes. This proposition met with much criticism, and perhaps there would have been less of it with the formula: "I act, then I exist." Discarding the thought and the word, Goethe, in the mask of Faust, exclaims: "In the beginning was the deed." A particle of power, original, original, having its own conscious direction - that's what a person is. Whether it is large or small, this particle, it can still say about itself:

So on the machine of passing centuries

I weave the living clothes of the worlds.

The fabric of the world, polysyllabic, patterned, in which, before our eyes, there is more and more gold of thought, purple of feeling, fiery will.

But an active world-outlook cannot take root in people like a barren fig tree. We said: it is not philosophy that recycles people, but people choose for themselves the philosophy that is most conducive to completing the process of their self-determination. But the philosophy of pure activity, dialectics, the philosophy of energy, which accepts the processes of labor as the key to the knowledge of all being, imagines the world as cooperation and struggle, nowhere and in no way contradicts the data of science and does not need to be borrowed from obsolete worldviews. "Philosophers have so far interpreted the world, the aim of our philosophy is to recreate it," says Marx. And this is not just a beautiful aphorism, it is a philosophical thesis. Man is given to himself as a worker, as a complex organism endowed with needs and labor power to satisfy them. The knowledge of nature is only an intermediate fact and a tool for reshaping it, humanizing it, humanizing it. In this sense, Marx advances against the bourgeois materialist metaphysicians a more "subjective and practical" attitude towards the world.11 Scientific theories are good as long as they are useful for human creativity, but they are only temporary creations of human hands, while activity, labor, is the basic fact of human existence itself.

The world immediately acquires the interest of a colossal drama with an undetermined outcome, or rather, with an infinity of ups and downs ahead, and the drama is played out not under a prompter, the characters are not puppets, this is a living drama, not a performance, and we are not spectators and not actors, but real its members. This outlook is a kind of grace, which is applied to the “possessing” and strong, 12 and this strength is naturally taken away from the poor, from the barren 13 . It does not follow from this that there is no need for preaching, propaganda of the worldview of pure activity, for ideologies fight among themselves for those who waver and grow up.

An active world-appraisal easily reaches the degree of enthusiasm; poets can sometimes find a vivid expression of such an experience. For example, among the beautiful "Legends" of Annunzio - a work that atones for all the sins of this richly gifted and broken writer - there is a description of a walk along the river on a July evening after rain. The mood is conveyed amazingly. The moon is rising, the swallows are screaming. From the hill, fields and the course of a silvery river are far visible. And suddenly a peculiar revelation touches the soul of the poet:

All the Earth as well

Clay offered to the work of Love

A nuncio the cry, and the vespers that dies

A sure dawn.

"The earth, like a lump of obedient clay in a sculptor's workshop, seems to offer itself to the creative hands of conscious love, each cry sounds like a promise, and the sad death of the day itself does not speak of anything else than the undeceitful rebirth of light in the morning."

But the new world, growing in the old one, like the fairy-tale prince Gvidon in a rotten barrel, conquers not only bourgeois materialism, but also bourgeois individualism.

Even physical motherhood, of course, altruistic and selfless in itself, can be closed in a very narrow circle of love and sympathy, but not spiritual and cultural motherhood. An idea, an image, a working force, the tension of a fighter, when we carry them in ourselves, bind us to humanity. They are not conceivable and not valuable in themselves, they are immortal and full of life when applied to the collective creation of the ideal in the real. The collective specific historical identification and consistent implementation of the ideals dictated by the needs of human nature, which are unlimited in their development, is the main thing in our human existence.

Marx, in his wonderful article "Malthus and Ricardo," explains that the only criterion in evaluating any phenomena should be their advantage for the growth of the wealth of mankind, which, as Marx immediately says, is equal to the growth of the abilities of human nature.

The view in its grandiose work considers the individual only as a moment and a part: whoever understands the meaning of the existence of the species not only with his head, but with his whole being, his life is overflowing with light, significance, the rapture of creativity, immensely beyond the bounds of a fugitive personal existence; who does not understand and protests, history leaves aside with his fruitless whining. This sounds in full agreement with the words of Mach: "To contribute to the social, artistic, scientific and any other enrichment of the human race - this is real happiness for the individual."

Probably Maeterlinck did not know either Marx or Mach when, in his book "Le temple enseveli", he put forward such a single criterion of morality: "Everything that contributes to the growth of the forces of the Species is good, everything that harms it is evil."

And for people of such a worldview, suicides are, of course, possible, but only reasonable ones, the condition for which is not only the burdensomeness of life for the subject himself, but also a correctly made assessment, leading to the conclusion that this life is useless for the collective. Such cases are rare, such cases will disappear altogether with the improvement of social hygiene in the broad sense of the word.

And in order to end with the words of an Italian poet, an article in which I have already resorted to their help more than once, I will cite the poems of dear Zanello, a Venetian folk poet.

advance, t'avenza

orange pine, —

I knew the room

What, was I tell you?

If slaves, if tears

Will reuse again —

E'qioin la terro!

"Forward, man, forward, amazing wanderer, do you know what place you are destined to occupy? Let the earth be still full of slaves and tears - it is young!"

Goethe.
Dostoevsky.
Schopenhauer.
The article was written and published in 1907
Mental love for God.
The hero of Greek myth, who became stronger by touching mother earth and who was defeated only by Hercules, lifting him into the air.
Literally "order".
Bazarov, Turgenev.
Andreev, L.
Engels.
Marx. "Notes on Feuerbach".
The proletarian class, rich in activity.
For the entire bourgeois world.