I
continued; "yet what is its basis? Perhaps everything in life is
symmetry? But no. On the contrary, this is life"--and I drew an oblong
figure on the board--"and after life the soul passes to eternity"--here
I drew a line from one end of the oblong figure to the edge of the
board. "Why should there not be a corresponding line on the other
side? If there be an eternity on one side, there must surely be a
corresponding one on the other? That means that we have existed in a
previous life, but have lost the recollection of it."

This conclusion--which seemed to me at the time both clear and novel,
but the arguments for which it would be difficult for me, at this
distance of time, to piece together--pleased me extremely, so I took a
piece of paper and tried to write it down. But at the first attempt
such a rush of other thoughts came whirling though my brain that I was
obliged to jump up and pace the room. At the window, my attention was
arrested by a driver harnessing a horse to a water-cart, and at once my
mind concentrated itself upon the decision of the question, "Into what
animal or human being will the spirit of that horse pass at death?" Just
at that moment, Woloda passed through the room, and smiled to see me
absorbed in speculative thoughts. His smile at once made me feel that
all that I had been thinking about was utter nonsense.

I have related all this as I recollect it in order to show the reader
the nature of my cogitations. No philosophical theory attracted me so
much as scepticism, which at one period brought me to a state of mind
verging upon insanity. I took the fancy into my head that no one nor
anything really existed in the world except myself--that objects were
not objects at all, but that images of them became manifest only so soon
as I turned my attention upon them, and vanished again directly that
I ceased to think about them. In short, this idea of mine (that real
objects do not exist, but only one's conception of them) brought me to
Schelling's well-known theory. There were moments when the influence
of this idea led me to such vagaries as, for instance, turning sharply
round, in the hope that by the suddenness of the movement I should come
in contact with the void which I believed to be existing where I myself
purported to be!

What a pitiful spring of moral activity is the human intellect! My
faulty reason could not define the impenetrable. Consequently it
shattered one fruitless conviction