"But science! art! You repudiate science, art; that is, you repudiate
that by which mankind live."
I am always hearing this: people choose this way to put aside my
arguments altogether without analyzing them. "He repudiates science and
art; he wishes to turn men back again to the savage state; why, then,
should we listen to him, or argue with him?"
But this is unjust. Not only do I not repudiate science--human
reasonable activity--and art,--the expression of this reasonable
activity,--but it is actually in the name of this reasonable activity
and its expression that I speak what I do, in order that mankind may
avoid the savage state towards which they are rapidly moving, owing to
the false teaching of our time.
Science and art are as necessary to men as food, drink, and
clothes,--even still more necessary than these; but they become such,
not because we decide that what we call science and art are necessary,
but because they are truly necessary to men. Now, if I should prepare
hay for the bodily food of men, my idea that hay is food would not make
it to be so. I cannot say, Why do you not eat hay when it is your
necessary food? Food is, indeed, necessary, but perhaps what I offer is
not food at all.
This very thing has happened with our science and art. And to us it
seems that when we add to a Greek word the termination _logy_, and call
this science, it will be science indeed; and if we call an indecency,
like the painting of naked women, by the Greek word "choreography," and
term it art, it will be art indeed.
But however much we may say this, the business which we are about, in
counting up the insects, and chemically analyzing the contents of the
Milky Way, in painting water-nymphs and historical pictures, in writing
novels, and in composing symphonies, this, our business, will not become
science or art until it is willingly accepted by those for whom it is
being done.
Till now it has not been accepted. If some men only were allowed to
prepare food, and all others were either forbidden to do it, or be
rendered incapable of producing it, I daresay that the quality of the
food would deteriorate. If the men who had the exclusive privilege of
producing food were Russian peasants, then there would be no other food
than black bread, kvas, potatoes, and onions, which they are fond of,
and which is agreeable to them. The same would be the case with that
highest human activity in art and science if their exclusive privilege
were appropriated by one caste, with this difference only, that in
bodily food there cannot be too great digressions from the
natural;--bread as well as onions, though unsavoury food, is still
eatable:--but in mental food there may be great digressions; and some
men may for a very long time feed upon an unnecessary, or even hurtful
and poisonous, mental food; they themselves may slowly kill themselves
with opium or with spirits, and this sort of food they may offer to the
masses of the people.
This very thing has happened to us. And it has happened because men of
art and science are in privileged conditions; because art and science in
our world are not that mental activity of all mankind, without any
exception, who separate their best powers for the service of art and
science: but it is the activity of a small company of men having the
monopoly of these occupations, and calling themselves scientists and
artists; and therefore they have perverted the very conceptions of art
and science, and lost the sense of their own calling, and are merely
occupied in amusing a small company of parasites and saving them from
burdensome dulness.
Since men have existed, they have always had science in the plainest and
largest sense of the word. Science, as the sum of all human information,
has always been in existence; and without it life is not conceivable,
and there is no necessity whatever either to attack or to defend it.
But the fact is this, that the reason of this knowledge is so various,
so much information of all kinds enters into it, from information how to
obtain iron up to the knowledge about movements of the celestial bodies,
that man would be lost among all this varied information if he had no
clew to help him to decide which of all these kinds of information is
more important, and which less.
Therefore, the highest wisdom of men has always consisted in finding out
the clew whereby to arrange the information of men, and to decide what
kinds of information are more, and what are less, important. This which
has directed all other knowledge, men have always called science in the
strictest sense of the word. Such science has always been, up to the
present time, in human societies which have left the savage state behind
them. Since mankind has existed teachers have appeared in every nation
to form science in this strict sense,--the science about what it is most
necessary for men to know. The object of this science has always been
the inquiry as to what was the destiny, and therefore the true welfare,
of each man and of all men. This science has served as a clew to
determine the importance and the expression of all other sciences. Such
information and art as co-operated with the science of man's destiny and
welfare were considered highest in public opinion.
Such was the science of Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Christ,
Mohammed,--science such as it has been understood by all men save our
own circle of so-called educated people.
Such a science has not only always occupied the first place, but it is
the one science which has determined the importance of other sciences.
And this, not at all because so-called learned men of our time imagine
that it is only deceitful priests and teachers of this science who have
given it such an importance, but because, as, indeed, everyone can learn
by his own inward experience, without the science of man's destiny and
welfare, there cannot be any determining of other values, or any choice
of art and science for man. And, therefore, there cannot be any study of
science, for there are _innumerable_ quantities of subjects to which
science may be applied. I italicize the word innumerable, as I use it in
its exact value.
Without knowledge as to what constitutes the calling and welfare of all
men, all other arts and sciences become, as is really the case with us
at present, only an idle and pernicious amusement. Mankind have been
living long, and they have never been living without a science relative
to the calling and welfare of men: it is true that the science of the
welfare of men to a superficial observation appears to be different with
Buddists, Brahmins, Hebrews, Christians, with the followers of Confucius
and those of Laotse, though one need only reflect on these teachings in
order to see their essential unity; where men have left the savage state
behind them, we find this science; and now of a sudden it turns out that
modern men have decided that this very science which has been till now
the guide of all human information, is the obstacle in the way of
everything.
Men build houses; one architect makes one estimate, another makes a
second, and so on. The estimates are a little different, but they are
separately correct; and every one sees that, if each estimate is
fulfilled, the house will be erected. Such architects are Confucius,
Buddha, Moses, Christ. And now certain men come and assure us that the
chief thing to come by is the absence of any estimate, and that men
ought to build anyhow according to eyesight. And this "anyhow" these men
call the most exact science, as the Pope terms himself the "most holy."
Men deny every science, the most essential science of men's calling and
welfare; and this denial of science they call science. Since men have
existed, great intellects have always appeared, which, in the struggle
with the demands of their reason and conscience, have put to themselves
questions concerning the calling and welfare, not only of themselves
individually, but of every man. What does that Power, which created me,
require from me and from each man? And what am I to do in order to
satisfy the craving ingrafted in me for a personal and a common welfare?
They have asked themselves, I am a whole and a part of something
unfathomable, infinite: what are to be my relations to other parts
similar to me,--to men and to the whole?
And from the voice of conscience and from reason, and from consideration
on what men have said who lived before, and from contemporaries who have
asked themselves the same questions, these great teachers have deduced
teachings,--plain, clear, intelligible to all men, and always such as
can be put into practice.
Such men were of the first, second, third, and all magnitudes. The world
is full of such men. All living men put to themselves the question, How
am I to reconcile my own demands for personal life with conscience and
reason, which demand the common good of all men? And out of this common
travail new forms of life are evolved slowly, but unceasingly,
satisfying more and more the demands of reason and conscience.
And of a sudden a new caste of men appears, who say, All these are
nonsense, and are to be left behind. This is the deductive way of
thinking (though wherein lies the difference between the inductive and
the deductive way of thinking, nobody ever has been able to understand),
and this is also the method of the theological and metaphysical periods.
All that men have understood by inward experience, and have related to
each other concerning the consciousness of the law of their own life
(functional activity, in their cant phrase); all that from the beginning
of the world has been done in this direction by the greatest intellects
of mankind,--all these are trifles, having no weight whatever.
According to this new teaching, you are the cell of an organism, and the
problem of your reasonable activity consists in trying to ascertain your
functional activity. In order to ascertain this, you must make
observations outside yourself.
The fact that you are a cell which thinks, suffers, speaks, and
understands, and that for that very reason you can inquire of another
similar speaking, suffering cell whether he or she suffers and rejoices
in the same way as yourself, and that thus you may verify your own
experience; and the fact that you may make use of what the speaking
cells, who lived and suffered before you wrote on the subject; and your
knowledge that millions of cells agreeing with what the past cells have
written, confirm your own experience, that you yourself are a living
cell, who always, by a direct inward experience, apprehend the
correctness or incorrectness of your own functional activity,--all this
means nothing, we are told: it is all a false and evil method.
The true scientific method is this: If you wish to learn in what your
functional activity consists, what is your destiny and welfare, and what
the destiny of mankind, and of the whole world, then first you must
cease to listen to the voice and demands of your conscience and of your
reason, which manifest themselves inwardly to you and to your
fellow-men; you must leave off believing all that the great teachers of
humanity have said about their own conscience and reason, and you must
consider all this to be nonsense, and begin at the beginning.
And in order to begin from the beginning, you have to observe through a
microscope the movements of amoebæ and the cells of tape-worms; or,
still easier, you must believe everything that people with the diploma
of infallibility may tell you about them. And observing the movements of
these amoebæ and cells, or reading what others have seen, you must
ascribe to these cells your own human feelings and calculations as to
what they desire, what are their tendencies, their reflections and
calculations, their habits; and from these _observations_ (in which each
word contains some mistake of thought or of expression), according to
analogy, you must deduce what is your own destiny, and what that of
other cells similar to you.
In order to be able to understand yourself, you must study not merely
the tape-worm which you see, but also microscopic animalcules which you
cannot see, and the transformation from one set of things into another,
which neither you nor anybody else has ever seen, and which you
certainly will never see.
The same holds good with art. Wherever a true science has existed, it
has been expressed by art. Since men have existed they have always
separated out of all their activities, from their varied information,
the chief expression of science, the knowledge of man's destination and
welfare; and art, in the strict sense of the word, has been the
expression of this.
Since men have existed, there have always been persons particularly
sensitive to the teaching of man's welfare and destiny, who have
expressed in word, and upon psaltery and cymbals, their human struggle
with deceit which led them aside from their true destiny, and their
sufferings in this struggle, their hopes about the victory of good,
their despair about the triumph of evil, and their raptures in
expectation of coming welfare.
Since men have existed, the true art, that which has been valued most
highly by men, had no other destiny than to be the expression of science
on man's destiny and welfare.
Always down to the present time art has served the teaching of life
(afterwards called religion), and it has only been this art which men
have valued so highly.
But contemporaneously with the fact that in place of the science of
man's destiny and welfare appears the science of universal
knowledge,--since science lost its own sense and meaning, and true
science has been scornfully called religion,--true art, as an important
activity of men, has disappeared.
As long as the church existed, and taught men's calling and welfare, art
served the church, and was true; but from the moment it left the church,
and began to serve a science which served everything it met, art lost
its meaning, and, notwithstanding its old-fashioned claims, and a stupid
assertion that art serves merely art itself, and nothing else, it has
turned out to be a trade which procures luxuries for men, and
unavoidably mixes itself with choreography, culinary art, hair-dressing,
and cosmetics, the producers of which may call themselves artists with
as much right as the poets, painters, and musicians of our day.
Looking back, we see that during thousands of years, from among
thousands of millions of men who have lived, there came forth a few like
Confucius, Buddha, Solon, Socrates, Solomon, Homer, Isaiah, David. True
artist-producers of spiritual food seem to appear seldom among men,
notwithstanding the fact that they appear, not from one caste only, but
from among all men; and it is not without cause that mankind have always
so highly valued them. And now it turns out that we have no longer any
need of all these former great factors of art and science.
Now, according to the law of the division of labour, it is possible to
manufacture scientific and artistic factors almost mechanically; and in
the space of ten years we shall manufacture more great men of art and
science than have been born among all men from the beginning of the
world. Nowadays there is a trade corporation of learned men and artists,
and by an improved way they prepare all the mental food which is wanted
by mankind. And they have prepared so much of it, that there need no
longer be any remembrance of the old producers, not only of the very
ancient, but also of the more recent,--all their activity, we are told,
was the activity of the theological and metaphysical period: all had to
be destroyed, and the true, mental activity began some fifty years ago.
And in these fifty years we have manufactured so many great men that in
a German university there are more of them than have been in the whole
world, and of sciences we have manufactured a great number too; for one
need only put to a Greek word the termination _logy_, and arrange the
subject according to ready-made paragraphs, and the science is created:
we have thus manufactured so many sciences that not only cannot one man
know them all, but he cannot even remember all their names,--these names
alone would fill a large dictionary; and every day new sciences come
into existence.
In this respect we are like that Finnish teacher who taught the children
of a land-owner the Finnish language instead of the French. He taught
very well; but there was one drawback,--that nobody, except himself,
understood it. We have learned everything very well, but the pity of it
is that nobody but ourselves understands it, and that everybody else
considers it good-for-nothing nonsense.
But to this also there is an explanation: Men do not understand all the
utility of the scientific science because they are still under the
influence of the theological period of knowledge, that stupid period
when all the people of the Hebrew race, as well as the Chinese and
Indians and Greeks, understood everything spoken to them by their great
teachers.
But whatever may be the cause, the fact is this,--that art and science
have always existed among mankind; and when they really existed, then
they were necessary and intelligible to all men.
We are busy about something which we call art and science, and it turns
out that what we are busy about is neither necessary nor intelligible to
men. So that we have no right to give the name of art or science to our
doings.