People who act so are guided by their reason and their conscience, and therefore we, men endowed with reason and conscience, declare such division of labour to be proper. But if it happened that blacksmiths were able to compel others to work for them and continued to make horseshoes when these were not wanted, and that teachers taught when there was no one to teach, it would be plain to every new-comer endowed with reason and conscience that this was not a division but an exploitation of other men’s labour, for such activity would infringe the only standard by which a fair division of labour can be known-a demand made for such labour by others, and a voluntary offer of remuneration for it. And yet it is just such an exploitation that the scientists’ science calls ‘the division of labour’.
People make things that others do not think of asking for, and demand to be fed for doing so and say that this is proper because it is a division of labour.
What constitutes the chief public evil the people suffer from-not in our country alone-is the Government, the innumerable quantity of officials; and the cause of the economic distress of our time is what the English call over-production: the making of a quantity of goods no one wants or knows what to do with, and all this results from the strange conception people have of the division of labour.
It would be strange to find a shoemaker who considered that people were bound to feed him because he unceasingly made boots that had long since ceased to be wanted by anyone; but what are we to say of those occupied with Government, the Church, science, and art, who produce nothing palpable or useful to the people, and whose goods find no demand, but who yet (pleading the division of labour) boldly demand to be well fed and well dressed?
There may be wizards whose activity meets a demand and to whom cakes and ale are’ given, but it is difficult to imagine that there can be wizards whose witchery nobody wants but who yet boldly demand to be well fed for their performances.
Yet that is just what is happening in our world among those employed in Government, and in the Church, and on science and art.
And all this results from a false understanding of the division of labour, defined not by man’s conscience but by the investigations that are announced with such unanimity by the men of science.
A division of labour always has existed and does exist, but it is only justified when man’s conscience and reason decide what it should be, and not when man merely observes that it does exist. And the conscience and reason of all men decide this question very simply, indubitably, and unanimously.
They decide that the division of labour is fair only when a man’s special activity is so needed by others that they, asking him to serve them, willingly offer him support in return for what he does for them.
But when a man can live on the backs of others from childhood till he is thirty, promising when he has finished his education to do something useful, that no one asks him to do, and when from the age of thirty till death he can go on living in the same way, still promising to do something no one asks him to do, this cannot be, and in our society is not, a division of labour, but simply a seizure by the strong of the fruits of the labour of others: ‘it is the very robbery theologians used to speak of as a ‘divine dispensation’, and philosophers afterwards declared to be ‘a necessary form of life’, and the scientists’ science now calls ‘the organic division of labour’.
The whole significance of the reigning science lies simply in that.
It has now become the granter of diplomas for idleness, for it alone in its sanctuaries examines and decides what is a parasitic and what an organic activity in the social organism-as if every man cannot recognize that much more truly and quickly by consulting his reason and conscience.
And as formerly for the priesthood and afterwards for the government, there could be no doubt as to who were the people others most needed, so now to the scientists’ science it seems there can be no doubt that its activity is unquestionably organic: they, the scientists and artists, are the most precious brain-cells of the organism. But God be with them! Let them reign, eat and drink well, and live idly, as the priests and the sophists of old lived and reigned, if only they did not, like those priests and sophists, pervert people.
Since men, rational beings, existed they have discriminated between good and evil and have made use of the distinctions those who went before them had made in this respect. They have striven against evil, sought the true and best path, and slowly but steadily advanced along it. And, obstructing that path, various deceptions have always been set in their way in order to show that this should not be done, but that men should go on living as of old. The terrible old deceptions of the Church arose, with fearful struggles and labour men gradually freed themselves from these, but before they were completely free there arose a new-State-philosophic-fraud to replace the old one. Men broke through that also. And now a new and yet worse fraud has grown up obstructing man’s path: the scientific fraud.
This new fraud is just like the old ones: its essence lies in substituting something external for the use of our own reason and conscience and that of our predecessors: in the Church teaching this external thing was revelation, in the scientific teaching it is observation.
The trick played by this science is to destroy man’s faith in reason and conscience by directing attention to the grossest deviations from the use of human reason and conscience, and having clothed the deception in a scientific theory, to assure them that by acquiring knowledge of external phenomena they will get to know indubitable facts which will reveal to them the law of man’s life.
And the mental demoralization consists in this, that coming to believe that things which should be decided by conscience and reason are decided by observation, these people lose their consciousness of good and evil and become incapable of understanding the expression and definitions of good and evil that have been formed by the whole preceding life of humanity. All this, in their jargon, is conditional and subjective. It must all be abandoned-they say-the truth cannot be understood by one’s reason, for one may err, but there is another path which is infallible and almost mechanical: one must study facts. And facts must be studied on the basis of the scientists’ science, that is, on the basis of two unfounded propositions: positivism and evolution which are put forward as indubitable truths.
And the reigning science, with not less misleading solemnity than the Church, announces that the solution of all questions of life is only possible by the study of the facts of nature, and especially of organisms.
A frivolous crowd of youths mastered by the novelty of this authority, which is as yet not merely not destroyed but not even touched by criticism, throws itself into the study of these facts of natural science as the sole path which, according to the assertions of the prevailing doctrine, can lead to the elucidation of the questions of life.
But the further these disciples advance in this study the further and further are they removed not only from the possibility but even from the very thought of solving life’s problems, and the more they become accustomed not so much to observe as to take on trust what they are told of the observations of others (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth state of matter,1 &c.), the more and more does the form hide the contents from them; the more and more do they lose consciousness of good and evil and capacity to understand the expressions and definitions of good and evil worked out by the whole preceding life of humanity; the more and more do they adopt the specialized scientific jargon of conventional expressions which have no general human significance; the farther and farther do they wander among the debris of quite unilluminated observations; the more and more do they lose capacity not only to think independently but even to understand another man’s fresh human thought lying outside their Talmud; and, what is most important, they pass their best years in growing unaccustomed to life, that is, to labour, and grow accustomed to consider their condition justified, while they become physically good-for-nothing parasites. And just like the theologians and the Talmudists they completely castrate their brains and become eunuchs of thought. And just like them, to the degree to which they become stupefied, they acquire a self-confidence which deprives them for ever of the possibility of
