Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/449

 essential for the well-being of humanity. True sciences and arts have always existed and always will exist, like all other branches of human activity, and it is impossible and idle to deny or defend them.

The false position which is occupied in our society by science and art merely proves that men calling themselves civilized, with scientists and artists at their head, constitute a caste with all the vices characteristic of every caste. They bring down from its height and diminish the principle in the name of which the caste is composed. They lay a heavy burden on the people, and, moreover, shut off the light, idly striving to prove that they are disseminating it. And what is worse than all, their acts always contradict the principles which they preach.

Not counting those that uphold an insufficient principle—science for science's sake, art for art's sake—they are all required to prove that science and art are essential, because they subserve the weal of mankind.

But in what consists this weal? By what signs can the weal be separated from the evil? The partizans of science and art dodge this question. They even suppose that a definition of well-being—blago—is impossible, and is outside of science and outside of art. Well-being in general, they say, is goodness, is beauty, but cannot be defined.

But they lie.

In all times humanity has only accomplished in its onward march that which has determined the good and the beautiful. Goodness and beauty were determined a thousand years ago. But this definition was insufficient for them, for the priests,—it displayed their emptiness and the perniciousness of what they called science and art opposed to goodness and beauty. The Brahmin, the Buddhist, and Chinese sages, the Hebrews, Egyptians, the Greek stoics defined good in the same accurate way. Everything that promotes unity among men is goodness and beauty; everything that separates them is evil and ugly. All men know this definition—it is imprinted in our hearts.