Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/332

316 an answer, and examine side-issues the investigation of which brings one to no definite result, but becomes more intricate the further one advances. Nor can this be otherwise in a science which selects the objects of its investigation haphazard, and not according to the demands of a religious conception of life, defining what should be studied and why; what first and what afterwards. For instance, in the now fashionable subjects of Sociology and Political Economy, it would seem that there is really only one question: 'How is it, and why is it, that some people do nothing, while others are working for them?' (If there is another question: 'Why do people work separately, hindering one another, and not together in common, as would he more profitable?' that question is included in the first. For were there no inequality, there would be no strife.) It would seem that there ought to be only that one question, but science does not even think of propounding and replying to it, but commences its discussions from afar off, and conducts them so that its conclusions can never either solve or assist the solution of the fundamental problem. Discussions are started concerning what used to be and what now is; and the past and the present are regarded as something as unalterable as the course of the stars in the heavens; and abstract conceptions are devised—value, capital, profit, and interest—and a complex play of wits results (which has now already continued for a hundred years) among the disputants. In reality the question can be settled very easily and simply.

Its solution lies in the fact that, as all men are brothers and equals, each should act towards others as he wishes them to act towards him; and, therefore, the whole matter depends on the destruction of a false religious law, and the restoration of the true religious law. The advanced people of Christendom, however, not only refuse to accept that solution, but, on the contrary, try to hide from men the possibility of such a solution, and therefore devote themselves to the idle play of intelligence which they call science.