The Retreat into Jargon — Anna Karenina

Levin arrives at his half-brother Sergey's rooms after the morning train, ready to ask advice about proposing to Kitty, but Sergey is not alone. A professor from Harkov has come to settle a fashionable quarrel: where psychological phenomena end and physiological ones begin. Sergey greets Levin with chilly courtesy and returns to the argument. Levin meant to wait, yet the dispute pulls him in.

He has read the magazine pieces as natural science, never until now linking evolution, reflex action, and sociology to his own rising questions about life and death. As Sergey and the professor talk, they seem to touch the spiritual point and then retreat every time into Wurt, Knaust, Pripasov, reservations, and appeals to authority. Levin watches the pattern, then asks the plain version: if his senses are annihilated and his body dead, can he have any existence at all?

The professor looks at him as at a bargeman who has broken the rules. Sergey smiles and says they have no right to answer yet, no requisite data. The professor plunges back into distinctions. Levin listens no more and simply waits for the room to empty.

At the table they have citations for every retreat. In the chair Levin still has a proposal he has not spoken and a fear they name premature.