Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/544

 we have achieved in the last century. In the future, by following in the same path, our science will solve all questions, and give happiness to all humanity. Our science is the most important activity in the world, and we men of science the most important and necessary men on earth."

So think and say the men of science of our time, and yet, seen in its full significance, no science in any age or nation has stood on so low a plane as the present one. One part of it, that which should study the means of making human life good and happy, is occupied in justifying the existing bad order of life, and the other is absorbed with the solution of questions of idle curiosity.

"How idle curiosity?" I hear exclaimed by voices indignant at such blasphemy. "How about steam, electricity, telephones, and all our technical improvements? Not to speak of their scientific importance, observe the practical results they have achieved. Man has conquered nature, subjected its forces to himself" …. and so on.

"But," replies the simple and sensible man, "all the practical results of man's victory over nature from long ago up to the present, are applied to manufactures injurious to the people; to means for exterminating men, to increasing luxury, dissoluteness; and therefore, man's victory over nature has not increased the welfare of men, but, on the contrary, made their condition worse."

If the organization of a society is bad, as ours is, where a small number of men dominate the majority and oppress them, then every victory over nature will inevitably only serve to increase this power and this oppression. And so it happens.

With a science taking as its subject, not the investigation of how people should live, but of what exists, and therefore occupied chiefly in investigating inanimate objects, and meanwhile leaving the organization of human society as it is,—with such science no improvements, no victories over nature, can improve the condition of men.