On the Significance of Science and Art
by Leo Tolstoy
- Pages
- about 86
- Category
- Philosophy
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 1.6 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
. . . {169} The justification of all persons who have freed themselves
from toil is now founded on experimental, positive science. The
scientific theory is as follows:--
"For the study of the laws of life of human societies, there exists but
one indubitable method,--the positive, experimental, critical method
"Only sociology, founded on biology, founded on all the positive
sciences, can give us the laws of humanity. Humanity, or human
communities, are the organisms already prepared, or still in process of
formation, and which are subservient to all the laws of the evolution of
organisms.
"One of the chief of these laws is the variation of destination among the
portions of the organs. Some people command, others obey. If some have
in superabundance, and others in want, this arises not from the will of
God, not because the empire is a form of manifestation of personality,
but because in societies, as in organisms, division of labor becomes
indispensable for life as a whole. Some people perform the muscular
labor in societies; others, the mental labor."
Not long ago, their reigned in the learned, cultivated world, a moral
philosophy, according to which it appeared that every thing which exists
is reasonable; that there is no such thing as evil or good; and that it
is unnecessary for man to war against evil, but that it is only necessary
for him to display intelligence,--one man in the military service,
another in the judicial, another on the violin. There have been many and
varied expressions of human wisdom, and these phenomena were known to the
men of the nineteenth century. The wisdom of Rousseau and of Lessing,
and Spinoza and Bruno, and all the wisdom of antiquity; but no one man's
wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this,--that
Hegel's success was the result of the symmetry of this theory. There
were other equally symmetrical theories,--those of Descartes, Leibnitz,
Fichte, Schopenhauer.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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