Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/244

 228 ESSAYS AND LETfERS

theirs. The order of things is such that chihlren's ill- nesses, consumption, syphilis and alcoholism seize an ever-increasing number of victims, while a great part of men's labour is taken from them to prepare for wars, and every ten or twenty years millions of men are slaughtered in wars ; and all this because science, instead of supplying correct religious, moral and social ideas, which would cause these ills to disappear of themselves, is occupied on the one hand in justifying the existing order, and on the other hand — with toys. And, in proof of the fruitfulness of science, we are told that it cures one in a tliousand of the sick, who are sick only because science has neglected its proper business.

Yes, if science would devote but a small part of those eiforts, and of that attention and labour wliich it now spends on trifles, to supplying men with correct re- ligious, moral, social, or even hygienic ideas, there would not be a one-hundredth part of the diphtheria, the diseases of the womb, or the deformities, the occa- sional cure of which now makes science so proud, though they are effected in clinical hospitals, the cost of whose luxurious appointments is too great for them to be at the service of all who need them.

It is as though men who had ploughed badly, and sown badly with poor seeds, were to go over the ground tending some broken ears of corn and trampling on others that grew alongside, and should then exhibit their skill in healing the injured ears, as a proof of their knowledge of agriculture.

Our science, in order to become science and to be really useful and not harmful to humanity, must first of all renounce its experimental method, which causes it to consider as its duty the study merely of what exists, and must return to the only reasonable and fruitful conception of science, which is, that the object of science is to show how people ought to live. Therein lies the aim and importance of science ; and the study of things as they exist can only be a subject for science in so far as that study co-operates towards the know- ledge of how men should live.