The children and the raspberries

Levin remembers Dolly's children left alone cooking raspberries over a candle and pouring jets of milk into each other's mouths, and their mother explaining what the waste cost grown-up people. What struck him was the quiet dull disbelief with which they listened: they cannot imagine the volume of what they consume, so they cannot believe they are destroying what they live on, and their own invention seems no worse than cups. He sees himself and all the philosophic theories in that — leading by strange ways back to what a man knew in advance. Left to make their own cups and milk their own cows, the children would starve. We destroy because we have our fill spiritually. Then he tests himself against the Church, raising the doctrines that always tried him — the Creation, the devil and sin, a Saviour — and finds that none disturbs faith in God and in goodness as man's sole vocation, each being necessary to the recurring miracle that millions of diverse people understand the same thing. Looking at the cloudless sky he grants that he sees a firm blue vault and is right to. 'My God, I thank Thee,' he says, wiping away tears.

The children with the raspberries do the work an argument would fail at, and Levin's examination of the Church doctrines is conducted as a stress test rather than an assent. The blue vault settles the epistemology: what the eye insists on is not corrected by what the mind knows. Tolstoy ends on the gratitude before Levin has had time to inspect it, which is the point of the next chapters.