To say that the activities of the arts and sciences have co-operated in
forwarding the progress of mankind, and by these activities to mean that
which is now called by this name, is as to say that an awkward moving of
the oars, hindering the progress of a boat going down the stream, is
forwarding the progress of the boat; while it only hinders it. The
so-called division of labour--that is, the violation of other men's
labour which has become in our time a condition of the activity of men
of art and science--has been, and still remains, the chief cause of the
slowness of the progress of mankind.
The proof of it we have in the acknowledgement that the acquisitions of
art and science are not accessible to the working-classes because of a
wrong distribution of wealth. And the incorrectness of this distribution
does not diminish in proportion to the progress of art and science, but
rather increases. Nor is it astonishing that such is the case; because
the incorrect distribution of wealth proceeds solely from the theory of
the division of labour, preached by men of art and science for selfish
purposes.
Science, defending the division of labour as an unchangeable law, sees
that the distribution of wealth based upon this division is incorrect
and pernicious, and asserts that its activity, which recognizes the
division of labour, will set all right again, and lead men to happiness.
It appears, then, that some men utilize the labour of others; but if
they will only continue to do this for a long time, and on a still
larger scale, then this incorrect distribution of wealth, that is,
utilizing of other men's labour, will vanish.
Men are standing by an ever-increasing spring of water, and are busy
turning it aside from thirsty men, and then they assert that it is they
who produce this water, and that soon there will be so much of it that
everybody will have enough and to spare. And this water, which has been
running unceasingly, and nourishing all mankind, is not only not the
result of the activity of those who, standing at its source, turn it
aside, but it runs and spreads itself in spite of the endeavours to stop
it from doing so.
There has always existed a true church,--in other words, men united by
the highest truth accessible to them at a certain epoch,--but it has
never been that church which gave herself out for such; and there have
always been real art and science, but they were not those which call
themselves now by these names.
Men who consider themselves to be the representatives of art and science
in a given period of time, always imagine that they have been doing, are
doing, and the important fact is that they are on the point of making
wonderful things, and that beyond them there has never been any art or
science. Thus it seemed to the sophists, to the scholiasts, alchemists,
cabalists, Talmudists, and to our own scientific science and to our
artistic art.