Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He heard a voice yesterday,' said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, looking at Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'Ah, a voice!' repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he must be as circumspect as he possibly could in this society, where something peculiar was going on, or was to go on, to which he had not the key. A moment's silence followed, after which Countess Lidia Ivanovna, as though approaching the main topic of conversation, said with a fine smile to Oblonsky— 'I've known you for a long while, and am very glad to make a closer acquaintance with you. Les amis de nos amis sont nos amis. But to be a true friend, one must enter into the spiritual state of one's friend, and I fear that you are not doing so in the case of Alexey Alexandrovitch. You understand what I mean?' she said, lifting her fine pensive eyes. 'In part, countess, I understand the position of Alexey Alexandrovitch . . ' said Oblonsky. Having no clear idea what they were talking about, he wanted to confine himself to generalities. 'The change is not in his external position,' Countess Lidia Ivanovna said sternly, following with eyes of love the figure of Alexey Alexandravitch as he got up and crossed over to Landau; 'his heart is changed, a new heart has been vouchsafed him, and I fear you don't fully apprehend the change that has taken place in him.' 'Oh, well, in general outlines I can conceive the change. We have always been friendly, and now . . . ' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, responding with a sympathetic glance to the expression of the countess, and mentally balancing the question with which of the two ministers she was not intimate, so as to know about which to ask her to speak for him. 'The change that has taken place in him cannot lessen his love for his neighbours; on the contrary, that change can only intensify love in his heart. But I am afraid you do not understand me. Won't you have some tea?' she said, with her eyes indicating the footman, who was handing round tea on a tray. 'Not quite, countess. Of course, his misfortune…' 'Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest happiness, when his heart was made new, was filled full of it,' she said, gazing with eyes full of love at Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'I do believe I might ask her to speak to both of them,' thought Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'Oh, of course, countess,' he said; 'but I imagine such changes are a matter so private that no one, even the most intimate friend, would care to speak of them.' 'On the contrary! We ought to speak freely and help one another.' 'Yes, undoubtedly so, but there is such a difference of convictions, and. besides…' said Oblonsky with a soft smile. 'There can be no difference where it is a question of holy truth.'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'I've been staying abroad and reading the papers, and I must own, up to the time of the Bulgarian atrocities, I couldn't make out why it was all the Russians were all of a sudden so fond of their Slavonic brethren, while I didn't feel the slightest affection for them. I was very much upset, thought I was a monster, or that it was the influence of Carlsbad on me. But since I have been here, my mind's been set at rest. I see that there are people besides me who're only interested in Russia, and not in their Slavonic brethren.. Here's Konstantin too.' 'Personal opinions mean nothing in such a case,' said Sergey Ivanovitch; 'it's not a matter of personal opinions when all Russia—the whole people—has expressed its will.' 'But excuse me, I don't see that. The people don't know anything about it, if you come to that,' said the old prince. 'Oh, papa! .. . how can you say that? And last Sunday in church?' said Dolly, listening to the conversation. 'Please give me a cloth,' she said to the old man, who was looking at the children with a smile. 'Why, it's not possible that a ll . . . ' 'But what was it in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read that. He read it. They didn't understand a word of it. Then they were told that there was to be a collection for a pious object in church; well, they pulled out their halfpence and gave them, but what for they couldn't say.' 'The people cannot help knowing; the sense of their own destinies is always in the people, and at such moments as the present that sense finds utterance,' said Sergey Ivanovitch with conviction, glancing at the old beekeeper. The handsome old man, with black grizzled beard and thick silvery hair, stood motionless, holding a cup of honey, looking down from the height of his tall figure with friendly serenity at the gentlefolk, obviously understanding nothing of their conversation and not caring to understand it. 'That's so, no doubt,' he said, with a significant shake of his head at Sergey Ivanovitch's words. 'Here, then, ask him. He knows nothing about it and thinks nothing,' said Levin. 'Have you heard about the war, Mihalitch?' he said, turning to him. 'What they read in the church? What do you think about it? Ought we to fight for the Christians?' 'What should we think? Alexander Nikolaevitch our Emperor has thought for us; he thinks for us indeed in all things.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  To Pyotr, who was paying a money-lender ten per cent a month, he must lend a sum of money to set him free. But he could not let off peasants who did not pay their rent, nor let them fall in arrears. It was impossible to overlook the bailiff's not having mown the meadows and letting the hay spoil; and it was equally impossible to mow those acres where a young copse had been planted. It was impossible to ex cuse a labourer who had gone home in the busy season because his father was dying, however sorry he might feel for him, and he must subtract from his pay those costly months of idleness. But it was impossible not to allow monthly rations to the old servants who were of no use for anything. Levin knew that when he got home he must first of all go to his wife, who was unwell, and that the peasants who had been waiting for three hours to see him could wait a little longer. He knew too that, regardless of all the pleasure he felt in taking a swarm, he must forgo that pleasure, and leave the old man to see to the bees alone, while he talked to the peasants who had come after him to the bee-house. Whether he were acting rightly or wrongly he did not know, and far from trying to prove that he was, nowadays he avoided all thought or talk about it. Reasoning had brought him to doubt, and prevented him from seeing what he ought to do and what he ought not. When he did not think, but simply lived, he was continually aware of the presence of an infallible judge in his soul, determining which of two possible courses of action was the better and which was the worse, and as soon as he did not act rightly, he was at once aware of it. So he lived, not knowing and not seeing any chance of knowing what he was and what he was living for, and harassed at this lack of knowledge to such a point that he was afraid of suicide, and yet firmly laying down his own individual definite path in life. XI T HE day on which Sergey Ivanovitch came to Pokrovskoe was one of Levin's most painful days.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  As the season is drawing to a close, I would beg you to return to Petersburg, as quickly as possible, not later than Tuesday. All necessary preparations shall be made for your arrival here. I beg you to note that I attach particular significance to compliance with this request. A. KARENIN. 'P.S. —I enclose the money which may be needed for your expenses.' He read the letter through and felt pleased with it, and especially that he had remembered to enclose money; there was not a harsh word, not a reproach in it, nor was there undue indulgence. Most of all, it was a golden bridge for return. Folding the letter and smoothing it with a massive ivory knife, and putting it in an envelope with the money, he rang the bell with the gratification it always afforded him to use the well-arranged appointments of his writing-table. 'Give this to the courier to be delivered to Anna Arkadyevna tomorrow at the summer villa,' he said, getting up. 'Certainly, your excellency; tea to be served in the study?' Alexey Alexandrovitch ordered tea to be brought to the study, and playing with the massive paper-knife, he moved to his easy-chair, near which there had been placed ready for him a lamp and the French work on Egyptian hieroglyphics that he had begun. Over the easy-chair there hung in a gold frame an oval portrait of Anna, a fine painting by a celebrated artist. Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced at it. The unfathomable eyes gazed ironically and insolently at him. Insufferably insolent and challenging was the effect in Alexey Alexandrovitch's eyes of the black lace about the head, admirably touched in by the painter, the black hair and handsome white hand with one finger lifted, covered with rings. After looking at the portrait for a minute, Alexey Alexandrovitch shuddered so that his lips quivered and he uttered the sound 'brrr', and turned away. He made haste to sit down in his easy-chair and opened the book. He tried to read, but he could not revive the very vivid interest he had felt before in Egyptian hieroglyphics. He looked at the book and thought of something else.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'What do you say, why not go after all?' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, evidently weary of the strain of thought. 'We shan't go to sleep, you know. Come, let's go!' Levin did not answer. What they had said in the conversation that he acted justly only in a negative sense absorbed his thoughts. 'Can it be that it's only possible to be just negatively?' he was asking himself. 'How strong the smell of the fresh hay is, though,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, getting up. 'There's not a chance of sleeping. Vassenka has been getting up some fun there. Do you hear the laughing and his voice? Hadn't we better go? Come along!' 'No, I'm not coming,' answered Levin. 'Surely that's not a matter of principle too,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he felt about in the dark for his cap. 'It's not a matter of principle, but why should I go?' 'But do you know you are preparing trouble for yourself,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, finding his cap and getting up. 'How so?' 'Do you suppose I don't see the line you've taken up with your wife? I heard how it's a question of the greatest consequence, whether or not you're to be away for a couple of days' shooting. That's all very well as an idyllic episode, but for your whole life that won't answer. A man must be independent; he has his masculine interests. A man has to be manly,' said Oblonsky, opening the door. 'In what way? To go running after servant-girls?' said Levin. 'Why not, if it amuses him? Ca ne tire pas à conséquence. It won't do my wife any harm, and it'll amuse me. The great thing is to respect the sanctity of the home. There should be nothing in the home. But don't tie your own hands.' 'Perhaps so,' said Levin drily, and he turned on his side. 'Tomorrow, early, I want to go shooting, and I won't wake anyone, and shall set off at daybreak.' 'Messieurs, venez vite!' they heard the voice of Veslovsky coming back. 'Charmante! I've made such a discovery. Charmante! a perfect Gretchen, and I've already made friends with her. Really, exceedingly pretty,' he declared in a tone of approval, as though she had been made pretty entirely on his account, and he were expressing his satisfaction with the entertainment that had been provided for him. Levin pretended to be asleep, while Oblonsky, putting on his slippers, and lighting a cigar, walked out of the barn, and soon their voices were lost. For a long while Levin could not get to sleep. He heard the horses munching hay, then he heard the peasant and his elder boy getting ready for the night, and going off for the nightwatch with the beasts, then he heard the soldier arranging his bed on the other side of the barn, with his nephew, the younger son of their peasant host.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'What a fine fellow he's grown! He's not Seryozha now, but quite full-fledged Sergey Alexyevitch!' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he looked at the handsome, broad-shouldered lad in blue coat and long trousers, who walked in alertly and confidently. The boy looked healthy and good-humoured. He bowed to his uncle as to a stranger, but recognising him, he blushed and turned hurriedly away from him, as though offended and irritated at something. The boy went up to his father and handed him a note of the marks he had gained in school. 'Well, that's very fair,' said his father, 'you can go.' 'He's thinner and taller, and has grown out of being a child into a boy; I like that,' said Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'Do you remember me?' The boy looked back quickly at his uncle. 'Yes, mon uncle,' he answered, glancing at his father, and again he looked downcast. His uncle called him to him, and took his hand. 'Well, and how are you getting on?' he said, wanting to talk to him, and not knowing what to say. The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously drew his hand away. As soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch let go his hand, he glanced doubtfully at his father, and like a bird set free he darted out of the room. A year had passed since the last time Seryozha had seen his mother. Since then he had heard nothing more of her. And in the course of that year he had gone to school, and made friends among his schoolfellows. The dreams and memories of his mother, which had made him ill after seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they came back to him, he studiously drove them away, regarding them as shameful and girlish, below the dignity of a boy and a schoolboy. He knew that his father and mother were separated by some quarrel, he knew that he had to remain with his father, and he tried to get used to the idea. He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it called up those memories which he was ashamed of. He disliked it all the more as from some words he had caught as he waited at the study door, and still more from the faces of his father and uncle, he guessed that they must have been talking of his mother. And to avoid condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom he was dependent, and, above all, to avoid giving way to sentimentality, which he considered so degrading, Seryozha tried not to look at this uncle who had come to disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of what he recalled to him. But when Stepan Arkadyevitch, going out after him, saw him on the stairs, and calling to him, asked him how he spent his playtime at school, Seryozha talked more freely to him away from his father's presence.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'No, it seems to be beginning again,' he thought, listening to the prayers. 'No, it's just ending: there he is bowing down to the ground. That's always at the end.' The deacon's hand in a plush cuff unobtrusively accepted a three-rouble note, and the deacon said he would put it down in the register, and his new boots creaking jauntily over the flagstones of the empty church, he went to the altar. A moment later he peeped out thence and beckoned to Levin. Thought, till then locked up, began to stir in Levin's head, but he made haste to drive it away. 'It will come right somehow,' he thought, and went towards the altar-rails. He went up to the steps, and turning to the right saw the priest. The priest, a little old man with a scanty grizzled beard and weary, good-natured eyes, was standing at the altar-rails, turning over the pages of a missal. With a slight bow to Levin he began immediately reading prayers in the official voice. When he had finished them he bowed down to the ground and turned, facing Levin. 'Christ is present here unseen, receiving your confession,' he said, pointing to the crucifix. 'Do you believe in all the doctrines of the Holy Apostolic Church?' the priest went on, turning his eyes away from Levin's face and folding his hands under his stole. 'I have doubted, I doubt everything,' said Levin in a voice that jarred on himself, and he ceased speaking. The priest waited a few seconds to see if he would not say more, and closing his eyes he said quickly, with a broad, Vladimirsky accent— 'Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind, but we must pray that God in His mercy will strengthen us. What are your special sins?' he added, without the slightest interval, as though anxious not to waste time. 'My chief sin is doubt. I have doubts of everything, and for the most part I am in doubt.' 'Doubt is natural to the weakness of mankind,' the priest repeated the same words. 'What do you doubt about principally?' 'I doubt of everything. I sometimes even have doubts of the existence of God,' Levin could not help saying, and he was horrified at the impropriety of what he was saying. But Levin's words did not, it seemed, make much impression on the priest. 'What sort of doubt can there be of the existence of God?' he said hurriedly, with a just perceptible smile. Levin did not speak. 'What doubt can you have of the Creator when you behold His creation?' the priest went on in the rapid customary jargon. 'Who has decked the heavenly firmament with its lights? Who has clothed the earth in its beauty?

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Again and again she went over in her memory all her relations with the family. She remembered the simple delight expressed on the round, good-humoured face of Anna Pavlovna at their meetings; she remembered their secret confabulations about the invalid, their plots to draw him away from the work which was forbidden him, and to get him out of doors; the devotion of the youngest boy, who used to call her 'my Kitty', and would not go to bed without her. How nice it all was! Then she recalled the. thin, terribly thin figure of Petrov, with his long neck, in his brown coat, his scant, curly hair, his questioning blue eyes that were so terrible to Kitty at first, and his painful attempts to seem hearty and lively in her presence. She recalled the efforts she had made at first to overcome the repugnance she felt for him, as for all consumptive people, and the pains it had cost her to think of things to say to him. She recalled the timid, softened look with which he gazed at her, and the strange feeling of compassion and awkwardness, and later of a sense of her own goodness, which she had felt at it. How nice it all was! But all that was at first. Now, a few days ago, everything was suddenly spoiled. Anna Pavlovna had met Kitty with affected cordiality, and had kept continual watch on her and on her husband. Could that touching pleasure he showed when she came near be the cause of Anna Pavlovna's coolness? 'Yes,' she mused, 'there was something unnatural about Anna Pavlovna, and utterly unlike her good nature, when she said angrily the day before yesterday: "There, he will keep waiting for you; he wouldn't drink his coffee without you, though he's grown so dreadfully weak."' 'Yes, perhaps too she didn't like it when I gave him the rug. It was all so simple, but he took it so awkwardly, and was so long thanking me, that I felt awkward too. And then that portrait of me he did so well. And most of all that look of confusion and tenderness! Yes, yes, that's it!' Kitty repeated to herself with horror. 'No, it can't be, it oughtn't to be! He's so much to be pitied!' she said to herself directly after. This doubt poisoned the charm of her new life.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'I don't know; but if you are convinced that you have no right. . .' 'I'm not at all convinced. On the contrary, I feel I have no right to give it up, that I have duties both to the land and to my family.' 'No, excuse me, but if you consider this inequality is unjust, why is it you don't act accordingly? . . .' 'Well, I do act negatively on that idea, so far as not trying to increase the difference of position existing between him and me.' 'No, excuse me, that's a paradox.' 'Yes, there's something of a sophistry about that,' Veslovsky agreed. 'Ah! our host; so you're not asleep yet?' he said to the peasant who came into the barn, opening the creaking door. 'How is it you're not asleep?' 'No, how's one to sleep! I thought our gentlemen would be asleep, but I heard them chattering. I want to get a hook from here. She won't bite?' he added, stepping cautiously with his bare feet. 'And where are you going to sleep?' 'We are going out for the night with the beasts.' 'Ah, what a night!' said Veslovsky, looking out at the edge of the hut and the unharnessed wagonette that could be seen in the faint light of the evening glow in the great frame of the open doors. 'But listen, there are women's voices singing, and, on my word, not badly too. Who's that singing, my friend?' 'That's the maids from hard by here.' 'Let's go, let's have a walk! We shan't go to sleep, you know. Oblonsky, come along!' 'If one could only do both, lie here and go,' answered Oblonsky, stretching. 'It's capital lying here.' 'Well, I shall go by myself,' said Veslovsky, getting up eagerly, and putting on his shoes and stockings. 'Good-bye, gentlemen. If it's fun, I'll fetch you. You've treated me to some good sport, and I won't forget you.' 'He really is a capital fellow, isn't he?' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, when Veslovsky had gone out and the peasant had closed the door after him. 'Yes, capital,' answered Levin, still thinking of the subject of their conversation just before. It seemed to him that he had clearly expressed his thoughts and feelings to the best of his capacity, and yet both of them, straightforward men and not fools, had said with one voice that he was comforting himself with sophistries. This disconcerted him. 'It's just this, my dear boy. One must do one of two things: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one's rights in it; or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.' 'No, if it were unjust, you could not enjoy these advantages and be satisfied—at least I could not. The great thing for me is to feel that I'm not to blame.'

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'He has been at home,' she thought, 'and didn't find me, and thought I should be here, but he did not come up because he thought it late, and Anna's here.' All of them looked at each other, saying nothing, and began to look at Anna's album. There was nothing either exceptional or strange in a man's calling at half-past nine on a friend to inquire details of a proposed dinner-party and not coming in, but it seemed strange to all of them. Above all, it seemed strange and not right to Anna. XXII T HE ball was only just beginning as Kitty and her mother walked up the great staircase, flooded with light, and lined with flowers and footmen in powder and red coats. From the rooms came a constant, steady hum, as from a hive, and the rustle of movement; and while on the landing between trees they gave last touches to their hair and dresses before the mirror, they heard from the ball-room the careful, distinct notes of the fiddles of the orchestra beginning the first waltz. A little old man in civilian dress, arranging his grey curls before another mirror, and diffusing an odour of scent, stumbled against them on the stairs, and stood aside, evidently admiring Kitty, whom he did not know. A beardless youth, one of those society youths whom the old Prince Shtcherbatsky called 'young bucks', in an exceedingly open waistcoat, straightening his white tie as he went, bowed to them, and after running by, came back to ask Kitty for a quadrille. As the first quadrille had already been given to Vronsky, she had to promise this youth the second. An officer, buttoning his glove, stood aside in the doorway, and, stroking his moustache, admired rosy Kitty. Although her dress, her coiffure, and all the preparation for the ball bad cost Kitty great trouble and consideration, at this moment she walked into the ballroom in her elaborate tulle dress over a pink slip as easily and simply as though all the rosettes and lace, all the minute details of her attire, had not cost her or her family a moment's attention, as though she had been born in that tulle and lace, with her hair done up high on her head, and a rose and two leaves on the top of it. When, just before entering the ballroom, the princess, her mother, tried to turn right side out the ribbon of her sash, Kitty had drawn back a little.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  'It's too much for me,' responded Levin. 'Do try, now, and put yourself in my place, take the point of view of a country person. We in the country try to bring our hands into such a state as will be most convenient for working with. So we cut our nails; sometimes we turn up our sleeves. And here people purposely let their nails grow as long as they will, and link on small saucers by way of studs, so that they can do nothing with their hands.' Stepan Arkadyevitch smiled gaily. 'Oh yes, that's just a sign that he has no need to do coarse work. His work is with the mind….' 'Maybe. But still it's queer to me, just as at this moment it seems queer to me that we country folks try to get our meals over as soon as we can, so as to be ready for our work, while here are we trying to drag out our meal as long as possible, and with that object eating oysters….' 'Why, of course,' objected Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'But that's just the aim of civilisation—to make everything a source of enjoyment.' 'Well, if that's its aim, I'd rather be a savage.' 'And so you are a savage. All you Levins are savages.' Levin sighed. He remembered his brother Nikolay, and felt ashamed and sore, and he scowled; but Oblonsky began speaking of a subject which at once drew his attention. 'Oh, I say, are you going tonight to our people, the Shtcherbatskys', I mean?' he said, his eyes sparkling significantly as he pushed away the empty rough shells, and drew the cheese towards him. 'Yes, I shall certainly go,' replied Levin; 'though I fancied the princess was not very warm in her invitation.' 'What nonsense! That's her manner. . . . Come, boy, the soup! . . . That's her manner— grande dame' said Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'I'm coming too, but I have to go to the Countess Bonin's rehearsal. Come, isn't it true that you're a savage? How do you explain the sudden way in which you vanished from Moscow? The Shtcherbatskys were continually asking me about you, as though I ought to know. The only thing I know is that you always do what no one else does.' 'Yes,' said Levin, slowly and with emotion, 'you're right. I am a savage. Only, my savageness is not in having gone away, but in coming now. Now I have come . . . ' 'Oh, what a lucky fellow you are!' broke in Stepan Arkadyevitch, looking into Levin's eyes. 'Why?' ' "I know a gallant steed by tokens sure, And by his eyes I know a youth in love,"' declaimed Stepan Arkadyevitch. 'Everything is before you.' 'Why, is it over for you already?' 'No; not over exactly, but the future is yours, and the present is mine, and the present—well, it's not all that it might be.' 'How so?' 'Oh, things go wrong.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Well, I tell you what,' he went on, flying off again to a subject quite beside the point, 'our district self-government and all the rest of it—it's just like the birch-branches we stick in the ground on Trinity Day, for instance, to look like a copse which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can't gush over these birch-branches and believe in them.' Sergey Ivanovitch merely shrugged his shoulders, as though to express his wonder how the birch branches had come into their argument at that point, though he did really understand at once what his brother meant. 'Excuse me, but you know one really can't argue in that way,' he observed. But Konstantin Levin wanted to justify himself for the failing, of which he was conscious, of lack of zeal for the public welfare, and he went on. 'I imagine,' he said, 'that no sort of activity is likely to be lasting if it is not founded on self-interest, that's a universal principle, a philosophical principle,' he said, repeating the word 'philosophical' with determination, as though wishing to show that he had as much right as anyone else to talk of philosophy. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled. 'He. too has a philosophy of his own at the service of his natural tendencies,' he thought. 'Come, you'd better let philosophy alone,' he said. 'The chief problem of the philosophy of all ages consists just in finding the indispensable connection which exists between individual and social interests. But that's not to the point; what is to the point is a correction I must make in your comparison. The birches are not simply stuck in, but some are sown and some are planted, and one must deal carefully with them. It's only those peoples that have an intuitive sense of what's of importance and significance in their institutions, and know how to value them, that have a future before them—it's only those peoples that one can truly call historical.' And Sergey Ivanovitch carried the subject into the regions of philosophical history where Konstantin Levin could not follow him, and showed him all the incorrectness of his view. 'As for your dislike of it, excuse my saying so, that's simply our Russian sloth and old serf-owner's ways, and I'm convinced that in you it's a temporary error and will pass.' Konstantin was silent. He felt himself vanquished on all sides, but he felt at the same time that what he wanted to say was unintelligible to his brother. Only he could not make up his mind whether it was unintelligible because he was not capable of expressing his meaning clearly, or because his brother would not or could not understand him. But he did not pursue the speculation, and without replying, he fell to musing on a quite different and personal matter. Sergey Ivanovitch wound up the last line, untied the horse, and they drove off. IV T HE personal matter that absorbed Levin during his conversation with his brother was this.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We thus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, an approach to an alteration of me's . False memories are by no means rare occurrences in most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the consciousness of the me. Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. The content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the stream of real life in a most perplexing way. The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. We quote what we should have said or done, rather than what we really said or did; and in the first telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest. Especially where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt that way, and the memory follows the story. Dr. Carpenter quotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as in instance of a very common sort: "It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously conscientious friend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which she appended an assurance that the table rapped when nobody was within a yard of it . The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promised to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transaction. The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinct statement that the table rapped when the hands of six persons rested on it! The lady's memory as to all other points proved to be strictly correct; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith."[297] It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accurate in all its details, although it is the inessential details that suffer most change.[298] Dickens and Balzac were said to have constantly mingled their fictions with their real experiences. Every one must have known some specimen of our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his own person and the sound of his own voice as never to be able even to think the truth when his autobiography was in question. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V.! mayst thou ne'er wake to the difference between thy real and thy fondly-imagined self![299] 2. When we pass beyond alterations of memory to abnormal alterations in the present self we have still graver disturbances.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The act of the hearer is immediately only the reaction of the soul against the incitement. . . . All communication between finite minds is of this sort. . . . Probably no reflecting person would deny this conclusion, but when we say that what is thus true of perception of another's thought is equally true of the perception of the outer world in general, many minds will be disposed to question, and not a few will deny it outright. Yet there is no alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we must construct it in thought, and that our knowledge of the universe is but the unfolding of the mind's inner nature. . . . By describing the mind as a waxen tablet, and things as impressing themselves upon it, we seem to get great insight until we think to ask where this extended tablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the perceptive act would be explained even if they did. . . . The immediate antecedents of sensation and perception are a series of nervous changes in the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed only in and through these nervous changes. But these are totally unlike the objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive the mind as in the light, and in direct contact with its objects, the imagination at least would be comforted; but when we conceive the mind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the dark chamber of the skull, and then not in contact with the objects perceived, but only with a series of nerve-changes of which, moreover, it knows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all the conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that we shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light and reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and the senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth, where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves. Finally, we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone completely, and knowledge has not yet appeared. Nervous signs are the raw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the most decided realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into a knowledge of the outer world, we must posit an interpreter who shall read back these signs into their objective meaning.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Date in time corresponds to position in space; and although we now mentally construct large spaces by mentally imagining remoter and remoter positions, just as we now construct great durations by mentally prolonging a series of successive dates, yet the original experience of both space and time is always of something already given as a unit, inside of which attention afterward discriminates parts in relation to each other. Without the parts already given as in a time and in a space, subsequent discrimination of them could hardly do more than perceive them as different from each other; it would have no motive for calling the difference temporal order in this instance and spatial position in that. And just as in certain experiences we may be conscious of an extensive space full of objects, without locating each of them distinctly therein; so, when many impressions follow in excessively rapid succession in time, although we may be distinctly aware that they occupy some duration, and are not simultaneous, we may be quite at a loss to tell which comes first and which last; or we may even invert their real order in our judgment. In complicated reaction-time experiments, where signals and motions, and clicks of the apparatus come in exceedingly rapid order, one is at first much perplexed in deciding what the order is, yet of the fact of its occupancy of time we are never in doubt. ACCURACY OF OUR ESTIMATE OF SHORT DURATIONS. We must now proceed to an account of the facts of time-perception in detail as preliminary to our speculative conclusion. Many of the facts are matters of patient experimentation, others of common experience. First of all, we note a marked difference between the elementary sensations of duration and those of space . The former have a much narrower range; the time-sense may be called a myopic organ, in comparison with the eye, for example. The eye sees rods, acres, even miles, at a single glance, and these totals it can afterward subdivide into an almost infinite number of distinctly identified parts. The units of duration, on the other hand, which the time-sense is able to take in at a single stroke, are groups of a few seconds, and within these units very few subdivisions—perhaps forty at most, as we shall presently see—can be clearly discerned. The durations we have practically most to deal with—minutes, hours, and days—have to be symbolically conceived, and constructed by mental addition, after the fashion of those extents of hundreds of miles and upward, which in the field of space are beyond the range of most men's practical interests altogether.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  It is the same with certain of our dimly-recollected experiences. We hardly know whether to appropriate them or to disown them as fancies, or things read or heard and not lived through. Their animal heat has evaporated; the feelings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of identity can be decisively cast. Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real and verifiable 'personal identity' which we feel . There is no other identity than this in the 'stream' of subjective consciousness which we described in the last chapter. Its parts differ, but under all their differences they are knit in these two ways; and if either way of knitting disappears, the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine day unable to recall any of his past experiences, so that he has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recalls the facts of it in a cold abstract way as things that he is sure once happened; or if, without this loss of memory, his bodily and spiritual habits all change during the night, each organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought becoming aware of itself in a different way; he feels , and he says , that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me, gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with nothing from out of the older time. Such cases are not rare in mental pathology; but, as we still have some reasoning to do, we had better give no concrete account of them until the end of the chapter. This description of personal identity will be recognized by the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professed by the empirical school. Associationists in England and France, Herbartians in Germany, all describe the Self as an aggregate of which each part, as to its being , is a separate fact. So far so good, then; thus much is true whatever farther things may be true; and it is to the imperishable glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifiable thing.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We may say with truth that in the majority of cases the coming representation will have been either habitual, recent, or vivid, and will be congruous . If all these qualities unite in any one absent associate, we may predict almost infallibly that that associate of the going thought will form an important ingredient in the coming thought. In spite of the fact, however, that the succession of representations is thus redeemed from perfect indeterminism and limited to a few classes whose characteristic quality is fixed by the nature of our past experience, it must still be confessed that an immense number of terms in the linked chain of our representations fall outside of all assignable rule. To take the instance of the clock given on page 390. Why did the jeweller's shop suggest the shirt-studs rather than a chain which I had brought there more recently, which had cost more, and whose sentimental associations were much more interesting? Both chain and studs had excited brain-tracts simultaneously with the shop. The only reason why the nerve-stream from the shop-tract switched off into the stud-tract rather than into the chain-tract must be that the stud-tract happened at that moment to lie more open, either because of some accidental alteration in its nutrition or because the incipient sub-conscious tensions of the brain as a whole had so distributed their equilibrium that it was more unstable here than in the chain-tract. Any reader's introspection will easily furnish similar instances. It thus remains true that to a certain extent, even in those forms of ordinary mixed association which lie nearest to impartial redintegration, which associate of the interesting item shall emerge must be called largely a matter of accident—accident, that is, for our intelligence. No doubt it is determined by cerebral causes, but they are too subtile and shifting for our analysis. ASSOCIATION BY SIMILARITY. In partial or mixed associations we have all along supposed the interesting portion of the disappearing thought to be of considerable extent, and to be sufficiently complex to constitute by itself a concrete object.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Against Stricker, see Stumpf, Tonpsychol., 155-162, and Revue Philosophique, xx. 617. See also Paulhan, Rev. Philosophique, xvi. 405. Stricker replies to Paulhan in vol. xviii. p. 685. P. retorts in vol. xix. p. 118. Stricker reports that out of 100 persons questioned he found only one who had no feeling in his lips when silently thinking the letters M, B, P; and out of 60 only two who were conscious of no internal articulation whilst reading (pp. 59-60).[75] I think it must be admitted that some people have no vivid substantive images in any department of their sensibility. One of my students, an Intelligent youth, denied so pertinaciously that there was anything in his mind at all when he thought, that I was much perplexed by his case. I myself certainly have no such vivid play of nascent movements or motor images as Professor Stricker describes. When I seek to represent a row of soldiers marching, all I catch is a view of stationary legs first in one phase of movement and then in another, and these views are extremely imperfect and momentary. Occasionally (especially when I try to stimulate my imagination, as by repeating Victor Hugo's lines about the regiment,Leur pas est si correct, sans tarder ni courir,

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The world's contents are given to each of us in an order so foreign to our subjective interests that we can hardly by an effort of the imagination picture to ourselves what it is like. We have to break that order altogether, and by picking out from it the items that concern us, and connecting them with others far away, which we say 'belong' with them, we are able to make out definite threads of sequence and tendency, to foresee particular liabilities and get ready for them, to enjoy simplicity and harmony in the place of what was chaos. Is not the sum of your actual experience taken at this moment and impartially added together an utter chaos? The strains of my voice, the lights and shades inside the room and out, the murmur of the wind, the ticking of the clock, the various organic feelings you may happen individually to possess, do these make a whole at all? Is it not the only condition of your mental sanity in the midst of them that most of them should become non-existent for you, and that a few others—the sounds, I hope, which I am uttering—should evoke from places in your memory, that have nothing to do with this scene, associates fitted to combine with them in what we call a rational train of thought?—rational because it leads to a conclusion we have some organ to appreciate. We have no organ or faculty to appreciate the simply given order. The real world as it is given at this moment is the sum total of all its beings and events now. But can we think of such a sum? Can we realize for an instant what a cross-section of all existence at a definite point of time would be? While I talk and the flies buzz, a sea gull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon, a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness, a man sneezes in Germany, a horse dies in Tartary, and twins are born in France. What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity of these events with each other and with a million more as disjointed as they form a rational bond between them, and unite them into anything that means for us a world? Yet just such a collateral contemporaneity, and nothing else, is the real order of the world. It is an order with which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories, and we break it into arts, and we break it into sciences; and then we begin to feel at home. We make ten thousand separate serial orders of it. On any one of these, we may react as if the rest did not exist.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Now we may postulate at the outset that all these forms of thought have a natural origin, if we could only get at it. That assumption must be made at the outset of every scientific investigation, or there is no temptation to proceed. But the first account of their origin which we are likely to hit upon is a snare. All these mental affections are ways of knowing objects. Most psychologists nowadays believe that the objects first, in some natural way, engendered a brain from out of their midst, and then imprinted these various cognitive affections upon it. But how? The ordinary evolutionist answer to this question is exceedingly simple-minded. The idea of most speculators seems to be that, since it suffices now for us to become acquainted with a complex object, that it should be simply present to us often enough, so it must be fair to assume universally that, with time enough given, the mere presence of the various objects and relations to be known must end by bringing about the latter's cognition, and that in this way all mental structure was from first to last evolved. Any ordinary Spencerite will tell you that just as the experience of blue objects wrought into our mind the color blue, and hard objects got it to feel hardness, so the presence of large and small objects in the world gave it the notion of size, moving objects made it aware of motion, and objective successions taught it time. Similarly in a world with different impressing things, the mind had to acquire a sense of difference, whilst the like parts of the world as they fell upon it kindled in it the perception of similarity. Outward sequences which sometimes held good, and sometimes failed, naturally engendered in it doubtful and uncertain forms of expectation, and ultimately gave rise to the disjunctive forms of judgment; whilst the hypothetic form, 'if a, then b,' was sure to ensue from sequences that were invariable in the outer world. On this view, if the outer order suddenly were to change its elements and modes, we should have no faculties to cognize the new order by. At most we should feel a sort of frustration and confusion. But little by little the new presence would work on us as the old one did; and in course of time another set of psychic categories would arise, fitted to take cognizance of the altered world.