Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/236

 220 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

out of account, certain other factors ; and that even these laws seem laws to us only because we discover them in a region so far away from us in time and space that we cannot detect their non-correspondence with actual fact.

Moreover, Carpenter points out that the method of science, which consists in explaining tilings near and important to us by things more remote and indifferent, is a false method which can never bring us to the desired result.

He says that every science tries to explain the facts it is investigating by means of conceptions of a lower order. ^ Each science has been (as far as possible) reduced to its lowest terms. Ethics has been made a question of utility and inherited experience. Politi- cal Economy has been exhausted of all concep- tions of justice between man and man, of charity, affection, and the instinct of solidarity, and has been founded on its lowest discoverable factor, namely, self- interest. Biology has been denuded of the force of personality in plants, animals, and men; the 'self here has been set aside, and the attempt made to reduce the science to a question of chemical and cellular affinities, protoplasm, and the laws of osmose. Chemical affinities, again, and all the wonderful pheno- mena of Physics are emptied down into a flight of atoms ; and the flight of atoms (and of astronomic orbs as well) is reduced to the laws of dynamics.*

It is supposed that the reduction of questions of a higher order to questions of a lower order will explain the former. But an explanation is never obtained in this way, and what happens is merely that, descending in one's investigations ever lower and lower, from the most important questions to less important ones, science reaches at last a sphere quite foreign to man, with which he is barely in touch, and confines its attention to that sphere, leaving all unsolved the questions most important to him.

What takes place is as if a man, wishing to under-