“Well, what do you think about it?” asked Pierre. “Why are you silent?”
“What do I think? I have heard what you say. That’s all right,” said Prince Andrey. “But you say, enter into our brotherhood, and we will show you the object of life and the destination of man, and the laws that govern the universe. But who are we?—men? How do you know it all? Why is it I alone don’t see what you see? You see on earth the dominion of good and truth, but I don’t see it.”
Pierre interrupted him. “Do you believe in a future life?” he asked.
“In a future life?” repeated Prince Andrey.
But Pierre did not give him time to answer, and took this repetition as a negative reply, the more readily as he knew Prince Andrey’s atheistic views in the past. “You say that you can’t see the dominion of good and truth on the earth. I have not seen it either, and it cannot be seen if one looks upon our life as the end of everything. On earth, this earth here” (Pierre pointed to the open country), “there is no truth—all is deception and wickedness. But in the world, the whole world, there is a dominion of truth, and we are now the children of earth, but eternally the children of the whole universe. Don’t I feel in my soul that I am a part of that vast, harmonious whole? Don’t I feel that in that vast, innumerable multitude of beings, in which is made manifest the Godhead, the higher power—what you choose to call it—I constitute one grain, one step upward from lower beings to higher ones? If I see, see clearly that ladder that rises up from the vegetable to man, why should I suppose that ladder breaks off with me and does not go on further and further? I feel that I cannot disappear as nothing does disappear in the universe, that indeed I always shall be and always have been. I feel that beside me, above me, there are spirits, and that in their world there is truth.”