TOLSTOI ON GERMAN CONCEIT

Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Volume XI, Issue 521, 11 May 1915, Page 2

TOLSTOI ON GERMAN CONCEIT

The following passage from one- of Tolstoy's earlier wbpks ••(written' in the sixties of the men of 1812) is^not: .without interest at the present juncture:— " .' "Pfuhl was one of those, hopelessly, immutably conceited • men, ready to face martyrdom for their own ideae, conceited as only Germans can be, just because it is only a German's conceit that is based pn an abstract idea — science, that is, the supposed possession of absolute truth. The Frenchman is conceited' from supposing himself mentally and physically to be inordinately fascinating both to men and to women. An Englishman is conceited on the ground of being- a ciiizen of the best-constituted State in the worM, and also because he, as an Englishman, always knows what is the correct thing to do, and knows that everything that he as an Englishman, does do is indisputably the correct thing. An Italian is conceited from being excitable and? easily forgetting himself and other people. A Russian is conceited precisely because he knows nothing and cares to know nothing, since he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. A conceited German as the worst of them all. and the most hardened of all, and the most repulsive of afl; for he imagines that he possesses the truth in a science of his own invention which is to him kbsolute truth."