Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/488

 not been the only people whose labor has been spent on this useless work; thousands of people have been occupied in making the paper, the type, and machines needed to print their works, and in feeding, clothing, and housing these scientific laborers.

Work for science? But the word science is a term so vague and ill-defined that what some people consider to be science is considered by others to be utterly futile, and this is the case not only with outsiders but even with the priests of science themselves. While those savants who favor a spiritual explanation of life, look upon jurisprudence, philosophy, and even theology as the most necessary and important of sciences, the Positivists consider these very sciences as childish twaddle devoid of scientific value; and, vice versa, sociology, which the Positivists look upon as the science of sciences, is considered by the theologians, philosophers, and spiritualists as an arbitrary and useless collection of observations and assertions. But more than this, even in one and the same branch of philosophy or natural science, each system has ardent defenders and equally ardent detractors, equally competent, yet holding diametrically opposite opinions.

Finally, does not each year witness fresh scientific discoveries, which, after exciting the wonder of the mediocrities of the whole world, and bringing fame and fortune to their inventors, are eventually found to be nothing but ridiculous errors even by those who promulgated them?

We all know that what the Romans looked upon as science par excellence, as the most important of occupations, and one which showed how superior they were to the barbarians, was rhetoric, that is to say, an exercise which nowadays is regarded with derision, which with us does not even rank as a science. It is equally difficult for us to understand the state of mind of the learned during the Middle Ages, who were quite convinced that all science was centered in scholasticism.

Unless, then, our century be quite an exception,—which we have no right to suppose, but—little