Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/490

 time do the laws of Darwin, the commas of Koch, heredity, etc.

And just as it was not exactly in the creation of the world in six days, the wound-curing serpent, etc., that the Hebrew believed, but rather in the infallibility of his priests, and hence in the truth of their assertions; even so the great majority of the cultured people of our time believe neither in the formation of the world by rotation, nor in heredity, nor in comma-like bacilli, but in the infallibility of their lay priests who are called scientists, who affirm whatever they pretend to know, with the same assurance as did the Hebrew priests.

I will even say that if the priests of old, amenable to no control save that of their colleagues, permitted themselves sometimes to digress from the truth merely for the pleasure of astonishing and mystifying their public, the priests of modern science have done as much, with equal effrontery.

The greater part of what is called religion is but the superstition of the past; the greater part of what is called science is no more than the superstition of the present day. The proportion of error and of truth is, I suspect, about the same in the one as in the other. Hence to work in the name of any belief, be it religious or scientific, is not only a doubtful means of ameliorating the life of mankind, but it is a dangerous proceeding which may produce more harm than good.

To consecrate one's life to the fulfilment of the duties imposed by religion,—prayers, communion, almsgiving; or, following the advice of M. Zola, to devote it to some scientific work,—is to run too great a risk, for one may find on the eve of one's death that the religious or scientific principle, in whose service one has spent one's whole life, is nothing but an absurd mistake!

Even before reading the speech in which M. Zola holds up work, whatever kind it may be, as a kind of virtue, I had always been astonished at the strange opinion (current especially in Western Europe) in regard to work. I always felt that it was excusable only in an irrational creature, such as the ant in the fable, to elevate work