Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/240

 224 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

and unimportant, is the general understanding of the meaning and purpose of life (that is to say, the religion) possessed by those who occupy themselves with science. But men of science to-day — not acknowledging any religion, and having therefore no standard by which to choose the subjects most important for study, or to discriminate them from less important subjects and, ultimately, from that infinite quantity of object* which the limitations of the human mind, and the infinity of the number of those objects, will always cause to remain uninvestigated — have formed for themselves a theory of ' science for science's sake,^ according to which science is to study not what mankind needs, but everything.

And, indeed, experimental science studies every- thing, not in the sense of the totality of objects, but in the sense of disorder — chaos in the arrangement of the objects studied. That is to say, science does not devote most attention to what people most need, less to what they need less, and none at all to what is quite useless, but' it studies anything that happens to come to hand. Though Comte^s and other classifications of the sciences exist, these classifications do not govern the selection of subjects for study, but that selection is dependent on the human weaknesses common to men of science as well as to the rest of mankind. So that, in reality, scientists study not everything, as they imagine and de- clare, but they study what is more profitable and easier to study. And it is more profitable to study things that conduce to the well-being of the upper classes, with whom the men of science are connected ; and it is easier to study things that lack life. Accordingly, many men of science study books, monuments, and inanimate bodies.

Such study is considered the most real 'science.' So that in our day what is considered to be the most real ' science,' the only one (as the Bible was considered the only book worthy of the name), is, not the con- templation and investigation of how to make the life of