Chapter LIII: Part XIX: Two Kinds of Mental Activity

(The following article was written by Tolstoy to serve as
an introduction to a collection of thoughts, aphorisms, and
maxims by La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, and
Montesquieu, which a friend of Tolstoy’s had translated into
Russian.)

The activity of human reason directed to the elucidation of the laws that govern human life has always manifested itself in two different ways. Some thinkers have tried to systematize all the phenomena and laws of human life into definite connection with one another. Such were the originators of all the systems of philosophy, from Aristotle to Spinoza and Hegel.

Others have helped the elucidation of the laws of human life not by elaborating shapely systems but by detached observations and apt expressions indicating the eternal laws that rule our life. Such were the sages of the ancient world who formed collections of aphorisms, the Christian mystic writers, and especially the French writers of the XVIth, XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, who brought this style of writing to the highest degree of perfection.

Such are the thoughts and maxims of La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Pascal, Montesquieu and Vauvenargues, not to mention the wonderful Montaigne, whose writings partly belong to this class.

If we compare all knowledge of the laws of human life to a ball continually enlarged by fresh acquisitions, then thinkers of the first, systematic class should be likened to men who try to enfold the ball with more or less solid and thick stuff in order to enlarge it equally all over. Thinkers of the second category are like men who, disregarding inequalities in the increase of the surface of different parts of the ball, enlarge it, not all over but at various points of the radii along which their thoughts naturally travel, generally outreaching the thinkers of the first kind and furnishing future systematizers with material to work upon.

The advantages on the side of thinkers of the first category are: coherence, completeness, and symmetry in their doctrines. The disadvantages are: artificiality in their structure, forced connection of the parts, often evident deviations from truth to secure coherence of the whole teaching, and (resulting from this) frequent obscurity and mistiness in the manner of exposition.

The advantages on the side of the second category of thinkers are: directness, sincerity, novelty, boldness, and, as it were, an impulsiveness in their thoughts, a freedom from shackles, and a corresponding vigour of expression. Their disadvantages are: fragmentariness and sometimes external inconsistency--though this latter is usually more apparent than real.

Their greatest advantage however is that whereas works of the first class--philosophic systems--often repel by their pedantry or, if they do not repel, weaken the mind of the reader by subduing him and depriving him of independence, books of the second class always attract by their sincerity, elegance, and brevity of expression. Above all, they do not crush the independent activity of the mind but, on the contrary, evoke it by obliging the reader either to deduce further conclusions from what he has read or sometimes, when he quite disagrees with the author, to contest his positions and thus arrive at new and unexpected conclusions.

Of this kind are the detached thoughts both of ancient and modern writers generally, and such are the thoughts of the French writers whose maxims are collected in the work before us.

_1908._