All living men put to themselves the question: How reconcile our desires for personal welfare with the general welfare of mankind demanded by conscience and reason? And from this general travail, new forms of life nearer to the demands of reason and conscience are slowly but unceasingly evolved.
Suddenly a new caste of men appear who say: This is all rubbish, it must all be abandoned. This is the deductive method of thought (though what the difference is
between the deductive and the inductive methods, nobody has ever been able to understand), it is the method of the theological and metaphysical periods. All that men have discovered by inner experience, and communicate to one another, concerning consciousness of the law of their life (functional activity, in the new jargon), all that from the commencement of the world has been accomplished in that direction by the greatest intellects of mankind, is rubbish and of no importance.
According to this new teaching it seems that you are a cell of an organism, and the aim of your reasonable activity is to ascertain your functional activity; and in order to do that you need only observe things outside yourself. That you are a cell that thinks, suffers, speaks, understands, and that you can therefore ask another similar speaking cell whether, like you, it suffers, rejoices, and feels, and so can verify your own experience; that you can avail yourself of what cells that lived, suffered, thought, and spoke, before you did have written about the matter; that millions of other cells confirm your observations by their agreement with those who have: recorded their thoughts; and above all, that you yourselves are living cells always by direct experience recognizing the justice or injustice of your functional activities-all this means nothing at all, it is all a bad, false method.
The true scientific method is this: if you wish to know what your functional activity consists in, that is to say, what is your vocation and welfare and those of humanity and of the whole world, you must first of all cease to listen to the voice and demands of the conscience and reason that manifest themselves within you and in your fellow-men; you must cease to believe what the great teachers of mankind have said about their reason and conscience, and must consider all these to be trifles, and begin all over again. And to begin from the beginning you must look through a microscope at the movements of amoebas and at the cells of tapeworms, or easier still, must believe everything that may be told you about them by people who have the diploma of infallibility.
And observing the movements of these amoebas and cells, or reading what others have seen, you must attribute to these cells your own human feelings and calculations as to what they desire, what they strive for, their reflections and calculations, and what they are accustomed to; and from these observations (in which every word is an error in thought or expression) you must by analogy decide what you are, what your vocation is, and wherein lies your own welfare and that of other cells similar to yourself. To understand yourself you must not only study tapeworms which you can see, but also microscopic beings you can hardly see, and the transformations from one being into another which no one has ever seen and which you will certainly never see.
It is the same with art. Wherever there has been a true science, art has always been an expression of the knowledge of man’s vocation and welfare.
Since the time that men first existed, from amid the whole activity which presents various kinds of knowledge they have selected the principal kind, that which presented man’s vocation and welfare, and the expression of the results of that knowledge has been art in the restricted sense of the word. Since men first existed there have been persons specially sensitive and responsive to the teaching of man’s welfare and vocation, who on psaltery and cymbals, by imagery and by words, have expressed their human struggle against deceptions which drew them from their vocation, expressed their sufferings in this struggle, their hopes for the triumph of goodness, their despair at the triumph of evil, and their rapture at the expectation of approaching blessedness.
Since man existed, true art which was highly esteemed has had no other purpose than to express man’s vocation and welfare. Always till recent times, art has served the teaching of life which was afterwards called ‘religion’-and only such art has been held in high esteem. But simultaneously with the appearance, in place of a science of man’s vocation and welfare, of the science of whatever comes to hand-since science has lost its meaning and purpose, and true science has come to be contemptuously called ‘religion’ from that very time art as an important human activity has disappeared.
As long as the church existed as a teaching of our vocation and welfare, art served the church and was true art, but since art left the church and began to serve science, while science served anything that came to hand, art has lost its importance and, in spite of its traditional claims and the absurd assertion that ‘art serves art’ (which only shows that it has lost its purpose), it has become a trade supplying people with what is agreeable, and has inevitably mingled with the choreographic, culinary, tonsorial, and cosmetic arts, whose producers call themselves artists with the same right as do the poets, painters, and musicians of our day.
We look back and see that during thousands of years, out of milliards of people a few dozen stand out, such as Confucius, Buddha, Solon, Socrates, Solomon, Homer, Isaiah, and David. Evidently such men were seldom to be met with, though in those days they were drawn not from a single caste but from among the whole people; evidently such true scientific and artistic producers of spiritual food were rare. And it is not for nothing that humanity so highly esteemed and esteems them. But now it turns out that all these great moving spirits in science and art are no longer of any use to us. To-day producers of science and art can by the law of division of labour be produced on the factory system, and in a single decade we can turn out more great scientists and artists than had appeared among mankind from the commencement of the world.
There is now a guild of scientists and artists, and by a perfect method they prepare all the spiritual food needed by mankind.
And they have prepared so much of it that the old, the former, geniuses, both the ancients and those nearer to ourselves, need no longer be held in remembrance-that was all an activity of the theological and metaphysical period, it all has to be wiped out; but real reasonable activity began about fifty years ago. And in these fifty years we have produced so many great men that in a single German university there are now more of them than there had been in the whole world; and we have produced so many sciences-fortunately they are easy to produce (one has only to add logy to a Greek noun and classify it among the ready-made tables, and a science is ready)-that not only can no man know them all, but no one man can even remember the names of them all their names alone fill a stout dictionary and new Sciences are coming into existence everyday.
They have made many that remind one of the story of the Finnish tutor who taught a landowner’s children Finnish instead of French. They have taught it all beautifully; the only pity is that nobody, except themselves, understands any of it everyone else regards it as worthless rubbish.
But of this too there is an explanation: people do not understand all the utility of scientific science because they are still under the influence of the theological period of knowledge-
that stupid period when the whole people, both among the Hebrews, the Chinese, the Hindus and the Greeks, understood all that their great teachers said to them.
But however it happened, the fact is that both Science and art have always existed among men and when they were real they were wanted by and were comprehensible to the whole people.
We are busy with something we call science and art, but it turns out that what we are doing as no right to be called either science or art.
CHAPTER XXXVII
‘BUT you are merely giving another, narrower definition of science and art-which science does not agree with,’ people say to me in reply. ‘But this does not exclude the rest, and there still remains the scientific and artistic activity of the Galileos, Brunos, Homers, Michael Angelos, Beethovens, Wagners, and all the scientists and artists of lesser magnitude who have devoted their whole lives to the service of science and art.’
This they usually say in order to establish a succession (which at other times they disavow) between the former scientists and artists and the present ones, trying also to forget that special new principle of the division of labour on the basis of which science and art now occupy their privileged position.
But first of all it is impossible to
