Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/334

 318 ESSAYS AND LETTERS

Meanwhile, the historians of another school tell us in what sort of country a people lived, what they ate, what they sold, what clothes they wore — and in general about things that could have no influence on the people's true life, but were results of their religion, which the historians of this class imagine to be itself a result of the food the people ate and the clothes they wore.

Yet an answer to the question : ' How did the workers liver' cannot be given till we acknowledge religion to be the essential condition of a people's life. And the reply is, therefore, to be found in the study of the religions believed in by the nations : for these brought them to the position in which they lived.

In the study of Natural History one would think there was little need to darken men's common-sense ; but even here, following the bent of mind which contem- porary science has adopted, instead of giving the most natural replies to the questions : ' What is the world of living things (plants and animals), and how is it subdivided?' an idle, confused, and perfectly useless chatter is started (directed chiefly against the Biblical account of the creation of the world) as to how organisms came into existence — which, really, one neither needs to know nor can know, for this origin, however we may explain it, always remains hidden from us in endless time and space. But on this theme, theories and refutations and supplementary theories are invented, filling millions of books, the unexpected result arrived at being : That the law of life which man should obey is — the struggle for existence.

More than that, the applied sciences— such as Technology and Medicine — in consequence of the absence of any guidance from religious principle, inevitably diverge from their reasonable purpose and take a false direction. Thus, Technology is directed not to lightening the toil of the people, but to achieving improvements needed only by the rich, and which therefore will yet more widely separate the rich from the poor, the masters from their slaves. If some