Levin lies down in the wood

Striding along the high-road, Levin attends less to his thoughts than to a condition of soul he has never known. Theodore's words act as an electric spark, welding a group of disjointed ideas into one. Living not for one's needs but for God is senseless by any reasonable measure, and yet he understood it at once, as everyone does — the one thing nobody doubts. He had wanted a physical miracle and had missed the everlasting one around him. Goodness with a cause or a reward is not goodness; it lies outside the chain of cause and effect. Breathless, doubting his own joy, he turns into the wood, lies on the grass, and watches a green insect climb a stalk of couch grass, turning back a goutwort leaf for it. He has discovered nothing, only perceived what he knows, and learnt to know his Master. Reviewing two years since his brother's illness, he concludes that he lived well and thought badly, living by truths taken with his mother's milk while evading them in thought. Without them he would have robbed, lied and murdered. Reason discovers the struggle for existence; the law of loving others could not come from reason, being unreasonable.

Tolstoy keeps the conversion physical — the dusty road, the hat off a wet head, the insect helped over a leaf — so the reasoning never floats free of the body doing it. The turn is the recognition of a belief already in use, which is why 'I have discovered nothing' can stand as the climax. Levin's charge against himself is roguery of mind.