The ethics of wine-drinking and tobacco-smoking / [Leo Tolstoi].

  • Tolstoy, Leo, graf, 1828-1910.
Date:
[1889?]
    with noxious fumes a room the atmosphere of which is being breathed by women and children who do not smoke. If before lighting their cigarette or cigar, they ask the company present, “ Have you any objection ? ” every one knows that he or she is expected to answer, “ Not the least! ” (although it is inconceivable that it should be anything but disagreeable to a non-smoker to have the air he respires poisoned, and to find stinking cigarette ends in glasses, tumblers, cups, plates, candlesticks, or even were it only in ash¬ trays). And even if we suppose that non-smoking adults can support the discomforts in question, surely no one will maintain that it is agreeable or wholesome for children, whose permission nobody ever thinks of asking. And yet people who are perfectly honourable and humane in all other respects smoke in the company of children, at table, in small rooms, poisoning the air with the fumes of tobacco, and never feel the faintest prick of conscience. It is commonly urged in favour of the practice—and I used to advance the plea myself—that smoking conduces to efficient mental work ; and there is no doubt that if we confine our consideration to the quantity of intellectual work done, we shall find this plea well grounded. To a man who is smoking, and who has consequently ceased to gauge and weigh his thoughts, it naturally seems that his mind has suddenly become thronged with ideas. As a mere matter of fact, however, his ideas have not become more numerous, but he has simpty lost all control over them. A man who works is always conscious of two beings within himself —the one who is engaged in work, and the one who sits in judg¬ ment upon the work done. The severer the judgment he passes, the slower and the more perfect is the work done, and vice versa. If the judge be under the influence of a stimulant or a narcotic, there will be more work done, but of an inferior quality. “ If I do not smoke, I cannot work ; I cannot get my thoughts upon paper ; and even when I have begun, I cannot go on.” So people commonly say, and so I said myself in times gone by. Now, what is the meaning of this statement ? It means that you have nothing to say, or that the ideas to which you are endeavouring to give expression have not matured in your consciousness—are only dimly dawning upon you—and the living critic within you, un¬ clouded by tobacco fumes, tells you so. Now, if you were not a smoker, you would, under these circumstances, either wait patiently until you had acquired a clear conception of the subject about which you wished to write, or else you would strive, by throwing yourself man¬ fully into it, to master it thoroughly, weighing and discussing the objec¬ tions that suggest themselves to your mind, and generally elucidating your thoughts to yourself. Instead of this, however, you take out a cigarette, and smoke ; the living critic within you becomes clouded,
    stupefied, and the hitch in your work is removed; that which seemed petty, unworthy, while your brain was still fresh and clear, now appears great, excellent; that which struck you as obscure is no longer so ; you make light of the objections that occur to you, and you continue to write, and find to your joy that you can write quickly and much. IV. “ But can it be possible that such a slight, almost imperceptible, change as is produced by the mild flush of excitement that ensues upon our moderately indulging in wine or tobacco should work such grave results ? No doubt, to a person who smokes opium, takes hashish, drinks alcohol so immoderately that he falls down help¬ less and bereft of his reason, the consequences may be very grave indeed ; but it is very different when a person only takes as much as suffices to cause a pleasurable excitement. This state can surely be pro¬ ductive of no such wide-reaching results.” This is the objection that people usually make. It seems to them that mere incipient inebria¬ tion—the partial eclipsing, or rather the mellowing, of the light of consciousness cannot entail serious results of any kind. Now, it is as reasonable to think thus as to imagine that, although a watch may be seriously injured by striking it against a stone, it is not liable to any damage whatever from the introduction of a splinter of wood, or some other foreign body, into its internal mechanism. It should not be lost sight of that the labour which is mainly instru¬ mental in moving and moulding human life does not consist in the movement of human hands, feet, or backs, but in modifications of consciousness. Before a man can perform anything with his hands and feet a certain change must necessarily have taken place in his conscience. And this change determines all the ensuing actions of the man. Now, these modifications of human consciousness are always slight, well-nigh imperceptible. The Russian painter Bruloff was once engaged in correcting a draw¬ ing of one of his pupils. He touched it very slightly with his pencil here and there, with the result that his pupil cried out : “ Why you have only given the drawing one or two scarcely appreciable touches, and it has undergone a complete transformation ! ” Bruloff senten- tiously replied : Art begins only there where scarcely perceptible touches effect great changes.” This saying is strikingly true, and not merely when restricted to art, but when applied to all human existence. We are justified in affirm¬ ing that true life begins only where scarcely perceptible touches begin to tell, where such changes as are produced are infinitesimally small, and seem to us of no account. It is not where vast outward changes take place, where people move backwards and forwards, cross-
    ing each other, clashing with each other, fighting and slaying each other, that true life is to be found; it is where infinitesimal differ¬ ential changes occur. Take Rasskolnikoff,* for instance. His true life did not coincide with the moment when he killed the old woman or her sister. When he set about murdering the old woman, and especially when he was killing her sister, he was not instinct with genuine life; he was act¬ ing as a wound-up machine acts, doing what he could not possibly refrain from doing ; firing off the charge that he had accumulated within himself long before. One old woman lay killed before him, the other stood there in his presence, and the axe was ready in his hand. Rasskolnikoff’s true life coincided not with the moment when he met the old wo man’s sister, but the time when he had not yet killed either of the two, when he had not yet entered a stranger’s lodging bent upon murder ; when he had no axe in his hands, no loop in his greatcoat on which to hang it, when he had no thoughts of the old woman whatever; it coincided with the time when, lying on the sofa in his own room, not thinking of the old woman, nor of the question whether it was lawful or not in obedience to the will of one human being to wipe out the earthly existence of another unworthy human being, but was debating with himself whether he should or should not live in St. Petersburg, whether he should or should not take his mother’s money, and meditating upon other matters that had no refer¬ ence whatever to the old woman. It is at such conjunctures that the greatest attainable clearness of mental vision is of the very utmost importance for the right solution of such questions as may then arise; it is at such moments that one glass of beer drunk, one little cigarette smoked, can hinder that solution, can cause it to be put off, can silence the voice of conscience, and can bring about a solution of the question in a sense favourable to our baser nature, as was the case with Rasskolnikoff. Upon what takes place after a man has already formed his decision and has begun to embody it in action, many important issues of a material order may, no doubt, depend; edifices may be pulled down in consequence, riches may be scattered to the winds of heaven, human bodies may be deprived of life; but absolutely nothing can be done but what was already included in the consciousness of the man him¬ self. The limits of what can take place are fixed by this consciousness. Let me not be misunderstood. What I am saying now has nothing in common with the question of free will and determinism. The dis¬ cussion of such matters is superfluous here, seeing that it has no connection with the question at issue, and I believe I may say it is quite superfluous for any intelligible purpose whatever. Putting aside, then, the question whether a man is or is not free to act as he pleases The hero of Dostoieffsky’s novel, “ Crime aid Punishment,’*
    (a problem which, it seems to me, is not properly stated), all that I am here concerned to maintain is, that as human activity is determined by scarcely appreciable changes in consciousness, it follows (whether we admit so-called free will or not) that too much attention cannot possibly be given to the state of mind in which these changes occur, just as the most scrupulous care should be taken of the condition of the scales in which we are about to weigh precious objects. It is incumbent upon us, as far as in us lies, to surround ourselves and others with the conditions most favourable to that precision and clearness of thought which are so indispensable to the proper working of our consciousness; and we should certainly refrain most scrupu¬ lously from hindering and clogging this action of consciousness by the consumption of brain-clouding stimulants and narcotics. For man is at once a spiritual and an animal being. His activity ■can be set in motion by influencing his spiritual nature, and it can likewise receive an impulse by influencing his animal nature. In this he resembles a watch which can be moved by moving either the hands or the main wheel. And as it is much more expedient to regulate the movement of a watch by its internal mechanism than by moving its hands, so it is far more judicious to determine a man’s activity by means of his consciousness than by means of his animal nature. And as in a watch we should be most concerned to maintain those condi¬ tions which ensure the smooth working of the inner mechanism, so in man we should lay most stress on the attainment and maintenance of unclouded purity and sharpness of consciousness, through which man’s activity is most easily and most conveniently determined. Of this there can be no doubt; every one feels and knows that it is true. But very often people also feel the necessity of deceiving themselves. They are not so much concerned that their consciousness should work smoothly and well, as that they should persuade themselves that what they are bent on doing is right and good ; and in order to acquire that persuasion they deliberately have recourse to means which they know will interfere with the right working of their consciousness. v. People drink and smoke, therefore, not merely for want of some¬ thing better to do to while away the time, or to raise their spirits; not because of the pleasure they receive, but simply and solely in order to drown the warning voice of conscience. And if that be so, how terrible are the consequences that must ensue ! In effect, just fancy what a curious building the people would construct who, in order to adjust the walls to a perpendicular, should refuse to employ a straight plumb-line, and for the purpose of measuring the angles should object to use an ordinary carpenter’s square, preferring to the
    former a soft plastic plumb-rule, that bends and adjusts itself to all the irregularities of the walls, and to the latter a carpenter’s square that folds and yields to the touch and adjusts itself equally well to an acute and an obtuse angle ! And yet this is exactly what is done in every-day life by those who stupefy themselves. Life is not regulated by conscience, it is con¬ science that plies and adjusts itself to life. This is what we see taking place in the life of private individuals. This it is which also takes place in the life of all humanity—which is but the sum total of the lives of private individuals. In order thoroughly to realise all that is involved in this clouding of one's consciousness, the reader has only to call distinctly to mind his frame of mind at each of the chief periods of his life. He will remember that at each of these periods he found himself face to face with certain moral problems which he was bound to solve in one sense or the other, and upon the right solution of which the well-being of his whole life depended. To arrive at this solution after an exhaustive survey of all the factors and phases of the problem is an utter im¬ possibility without putting a very severe strain upon the attention. Now, this effort of attention constitutes work. Whatever work we put our hands to, there is always a period in its progress—generally the commencement—when its disagreeable features very strongly impress us, when it seems peculiarly arduous and irksome, and human nature in its weakness suggests the wish to abandon it altogether. Physical work seems irksome in the beginning, intellectual labour appears still more irksome. As Lessing remarks, people have the habit of ceasing to think as soon as the process of thinking becomes difficult, and in my opinion precisely when it becomes fruitful. A man feels instinctively that the problems that come up before him. clamouring for a solution, the Sphinx’s riddles that must be answered on pain of death, cannot be properly thought out without strenuous and, in many cases, painful labour, and this he would gladly shirk. Now, if he were bereft of the means of clouding his mental faculties, it would be impossible for him to expunge from the tablets of his conscience the questions on the order of the day, and, nolens volens, he would find himself in conditions that necessitated an answer, and admitted neither of excuse nor delay. But, behold, he discovers an effective means of putting off these questions whenever they present themselves for a solution ; and he does not fail to make use of it. The moment life demands an answer to these questions, and they begin to worry and harass him, he has recourse to those artificial means, and delivers himself from the vexation of spirit engendered by the dis¬ quieting questions. His consciousness no longer presses for a speedy solution, and the problems remain unsolved until the next interval of lucidity. But when the following period of lucidity comes round the same thing is repeated, and the individual continues to stand for