Unity

I

Unity

“Each person is a being completely separate from all others. My true existence is only within myself; everything else is not-I and is foreign to me.” This is a cognition whose truth is attested by flesh and blood, which lies at the foundation of all self-love, and whose real expression is every unloving, unjust, or malicious act.

“My true inner being lives in all that lives just as immediately as in my own self-consciousness it is revealed only to me.” This is a cognition that is expressed in the Sanskrit formula tat-twam-asi, that is, “all this is you,” and which manifests as compassion—upon which therefore is founded all true, that is, disinterested virtue, and whose real expression is every good deed. It is upon this cognition that ultimately every appeal to kindness, humanity, and mercy is based: for such an appeal is a reminder of the point of view from which we are all one and the same being. On the contrary, self-love, envy, hatred, persecution, hardheartedness, revenge, malicious joy, and cruelty are based on that first cognition and cling to it. The tender emotion and rapture we feel when hearing, still more when seeing, and most of all when ourselves performing a noble act has its deepest foundation in the fact that it instills in us the certainty that beneath the multiplicity and diversity of persons lies their unity, which truly exists and is accessible to us, since it has revealed itself in deed.

The manifestation of one or the other of these two kinds of cognition appears not only in individual acts but also in the entire character of consciousness and state of spirit of people. In a person of good character this consciousness is quite different from that in a person of evil character. A person of evil character everywhere feels a firm barrier between himself and everything outside him. The world for him is “not-I,” and his attitude toward it is from the start hostile; therefore his fundamental mood is always one of ill-will, suspicion, envy, and malicious joy. But a person of good character does not live within himself alone but in the external world, which he recognizes as consubstantial with himself; others for him are not “not-I” but “all of me as well.” And therefore his attitude toward everyone is always friendly: he feels his kinship with all beings, takes immediate part in their well-being and misfortune, and trustingly assumes in them the same concern. And in him there is firmly established that peace and that confident, calm, contented state of spirit from which everyone near him feels better.

—Schopenhauer

---

II

Sea Voyage

I was sailing from Hamburg to London. There were two of us passengers: myself and a small monkey, a female of the marmoset kind, whom a Hamburg merchant was sending as a gift to his English partner.

She was tied by a thin chain to one of the benches on deck and was thrashing about and squealing piteously, like a bird.

Every time I passed by, she stretched out her little black cold hand toward me and looked at me with her sad, almost human little eyes. I took her hand, and she stopped squealing and thrashing about.

There was a dead calm. The sea stretched around us like a motionless tablecloth of leaden color.

Incessantly and plaintively, no worse than the monkey’s squealing, a small bell clanged at the stern.

From time to time a seal surfaced, and somersaulting sharply, dove under the barely disturbed surface.

And the captain, a silent man with a tanned, sullen face, smoked a short pipe and angrily spat into the frozen sea.

To all my questions he responded with curt growling; perforce I had to turn to my only companion—the monkey.

I sat down beside her; she stopped squealing and again stretched out her hands to me.

A drowsy dampness enveloped us both from the motionless fog; and, immersed in the same unconscious reverie, we remained near each other as if kin.

I smile now… but then there was another feeling in me.

We are all children of one mother—and it was pleasant for me that the poor little creature so trustingly grew calm and nestled against me, as if to a relative.

—Ivan Turgenev

---

Translator’s Notes:

• Tat-twam-asi (Sanskrit: “that thou art”) is a fundamental concept in Vedantic philosophy, expressing the identity of the individual soul with the universal spirit. Schopenhauer was deeply influenced by Indian philosophy.
• “Consubstantial” (односущный) is a theological term from the Nicene Creed, here used philosophically to mean “of one substance” or “of the same essential nature.”
• Turgenev’s piece is from his Poems in Prose (Стихотворения в прозе), a collection of brief meditative sketches written late in his life.
• The pairing of these two texts illustrates Tolstoy’s method in The Circle of Reading: philosophical argument followed by literary illustration, both pointing toward the same truth of universal kinship.
• The marmoset (уистити) is a small New World monkey, emphasizing the creature’s vulnerability and the universality of the compassionate connection.