[79]
[79] I cull these examples from the work of G. Dumas: La
Tristesse et la Joie, 1900.
Now there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the
profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The
unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical
solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and
unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering
and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in
the desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter,
the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying
religious solution.
At about the age of fifty, Tolstoy relates that he began to have
moments of perplexity, of what he calls arrest, as if he knew not
"how to live," or what to do. It is obvious that these were
moments in which the excitement and interest which our functions
naturally bring had ceased. Life had been enchanting, it was now
flat sober, more than <150> sober, dead. Things were
meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident. The
questions "Why?" and "What next?" began to beset him more and
more frequently.
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