Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/241

 man more kindly and more happy, but the compilation and copying from many books into one of all that our predecessors wrote on a certain subject, the pouring of liquids out of one glass bottle into another, the skilful slicing of microscopic preparations, the cultivation of bacteria, the cutting up of frogs and dogs, the investi- gation of X rays, the theory of numbers, the chemical composition of the stars, etc.

Meanwhile all those sciences which aim at making human life kindlier and happier — religious, moral, and social science — are considered by the dominant science to be unscientific, and are abandoned to the theologians, philosophers, jurists, historians, and political econo- mists ; who, under the guise of scientific investigation, are chiefly occupied in demonstrating that the existing order of society (the advantages of which they enjoy) is the very one which ought to exist, and that, there- fore, it must not only not be changed, but must be maintained by all means.

Not to mention Theology and Jurisprudence, Political Economy, the most advanced of the sciences of this group, is remarkable in tliis respect. The most prevalent Political Economy (that of Karl Marx),* accepting the existing order of life as though it were what it ought to be, not only does not call on men to alter that order — that is to say, does not point out to them how they ought to live that their condition may improve — but, on the contrary, it demands an increase in the cruelty of the existing order of things, that its more-than-questionable predictions may be fulfilled, concerning what will happen if people continue to live as badly as they are now living.

And, as always occurs, the lower a human activity descends — the more widely it diverges from what it should be — the more its self-confidence increases. That

German type of Social Democracy, have had, and still have, more vogue than in England.
 * In Russia the rigid theories of Karl Marx, and the