the stone of the pavement. He was not thinking at all of the stones
when he scrutinized them, still less was he thinking of them when he
was accomplishing his task: he was whetting his knife. He was
obliged to whet his knife so that he could cut the meat; but to me it
seemed as though he were doing something to the stones of the
sidewalk. Just so it appears as though humanity were occupied with
commerce, conventions, wars, sciences, arts; but only one business is
of importance to it, and with only one business is it occupied: it
is elucidating to itself those moral laws by which it lives. The
moral laws are already in existence; humanity is only elucidating
them, and this elucidation seems unimportant and imperceptible for
any one who has no need of moral laws, who does not wish to live by
them. But this elucidation of the moral law is not only weighty, but
the only real business of all humanity. This elucidation is
imperceptible just as the difference between the dull and the sharp
knife is imperceptible. The knife is a knife all the same, and for a
person who is not obliged to cut any thing with this knife, the
difference between the dull and the sharp one is imperceptible. For
the man who has come to an understanding that his whole life depends
on the greater or less degree of sharpness in the knife,--for such a
man, every whetting of it is weighty, and that man knows that the
knife is a knife only when it is sharp, when it cuts that which needs
cutting.

This is what happened to me, when I began to write my essay. It
seemed to me that I knew all about it, that I understood every thing
connected with those questions which had produced on me the
impressions of the Lyapinsky house, and the census; but when I
attempted to take account of them and to demonstrate them, it turned
out that the knife would not cut, and that it must be whetted. And