Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/237

 MODERN SCIENCE 221

stand the use of an object lying before him — instead of coming close to it^ examining it from all sides and handling it— were to retire further and further from it, until he was at such a distance from, the object that all its peculiarities of colour and inequalities of surface had disappeared^ and only its outline was still visible against the horizon ; and as if, from there, he were to begin writing a minute description of the object, imagining that now, at last, he clearly understood it, and that this understanding, formed at such a distance, would assist a complete comprehension of it. And it is this self-deception tiiat is partly exposed by Carpenter's criticism, which shows, first, that the knowledge afforded us by the natural sciences amounts merely to convenient generalizations, which ceilainly do not express actual facts ; and, secondly, that the method of science by which facts of a higher order are reduced to facts of a lower order, will never furnish us with an explanation of the former.

But without predetermining the question whether experimental science will, or will not, by its methods, ever bring us to the solution of the most serious problems of human life, the activity of experimental science itself, in its relation to the eternal and most reasonable demands of man, is so anomalous as to amaze one.

People must live. But in order to live they must know how to live. And all men always obtained this knowledge— well or ill — and in conformity with it have lived, and progressed ; and this knowledge of how men should live has from the days of Moses, Solon, and Confucius been always considered a science — the very essence of science. And only in our time has it come to be considered that the science telling us how to live, is not a science at all, but that only experimental science — commencing with Mathematics and ending in Sociology — is real science.

And a strange misunderstanding results.

A plain, reasonable working man supposes, in the old way which is also the common-sense way, that if there