On the Significance of Science and Art

CHAPTER I.

. . . {1} 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."

Upon this doctrine is founded the prevailing justification of our
time.

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. There was but one reason why this
doctrine won for itself, for a season, the belief of the whole
world; and this reason was, that the deductions of that philosophy
winked at people's weaknesses. These deductions were summed up in
this,--that every thing was reasonable, every thing good; and that
no one was to blame.

When I began my career, Hegelianism was the foundation of every
thing. It was floating in the air; it was expressed in newspaper
and periodical articles, in historical and judicial lectures, in
novels, in treatises, in art, in sermons, in conversation. The man
who was not acquainted with Hegal had no right to speak. Any one