SOURCE: "Tolstoi as Prophet," in Gospels of Anarchy and Other Contemporary Studies, T. Fisher Unwin, 1908, pp. 105-31.

In the following essay, Lee examines the major tenets of Tolstoy's philosophy and the ways in which it exemplifies his asceticism.

In his religious and philosophical writings, Count Tolstoi would seem to represent the prophetic temperament in such incarnation as is likely to become the commonest, indeed perhaps the only possible, one in the near future. For, in the gradual disruption of dogmatic creeds, the man born to the prophetic quality and function tends more and more to be a heretic and an anarchist; to practise an exegesis backed by no authority; and to benefit or harass mankind, to exhibit to mankind the spectacle of prophecy, more and more obviously without any inspiration save the unquestioned one of his own individual constitution. The Prophet, being a type of humanity, represents certain...