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with a powerful mentality--both of which are barriers to the "still small voice" of the soul, through which alone comes the conviction of the nothingness of death.

A biographer says of Tolstoi:

"The fit of the fear of death which at the end of the seventies brought him to the verge of suicide, was not the first and apparently not the last and at any rate not the only one. He felt something like it fifteen years before when his brother Nicolai died. Then he fell ill and conjectured the presence of the complaint that killed his brother--consumption. He had constant pain in his chest and side. He had to go and try to cure himself in the Steppe by a course of koumiss, and did actually cure himself. Formerly these recurrent attacks of spiritual or physical weakness were cured in him, not by any mental or moral upheavals, but simply by his vitality, its exuberance and intoxication."

The birth of the new consciousness which came to Tolstoi a few years later, was born into existence through these terrible struggles and mental agonies, inevitable because of the very nature of his heredity and education and environment. Although as we know, he came of gentle-folk, there was much of the Russian peasant in Tolstoi's makeup. His organism, both as to physical and mental elements, was like a piece of