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 establish such a succession between the former workers and the present ones-as the holy life of the first Christians has nothing in common with the lives of the Popes, so the activity of men like Galileo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven has nothing in common with the activities of men like Tyndall, Victor Hugo, and Wagner. As the holy Fathers would have repudiated connexion with the Popes, so the former leaders in science would have repudiated connexion with those of to-day.
And secondly, thanks to the importance science and art now attribute to themselves, we have a very clear standard set by science itself, by which to determine whether or not they fulfil their purpose, and so to decide not arbitrarily but according to an accepted standard, whether the activity calling itself science and art has a right to do so.
When Egyptian and Grecian priests performed mysteries which were concealed from everybody, and said that these mysteries contained all science and all art-we could not on the score of benefits conferred by them on the people verify the validity of their science, for they alleged it to be super-natural; but now we all have a very clear and simple standard excluding everything supernatural: science and art undertake to perform the brain-work of humanity for the benefit of society or of mankind. And therefore we have a right to call only such activity ‘science and art’ as has that aim in view and attains it.
And therefore, however those learned men and artists call themselves who excogitate the theory of penal, civil, and international law, who invent new guns and explosives, who compose obscene operas and operettas or similarly obscene novels, we have no right to call such activity science and art; for that activity has not the welfare of society or of mankind in view, but is on the contrary directed to the injury of man.
All this therefore is not science or art. In the same way, however learned men may call themselves who in their simplicity devote their whole lives to the study of microscopic animalculae and of telescopic and spectral phenomena, or those artists who after a laborious study of the memorials of antiquity are busy writing historical novels, painting pictures, or composing symphonies and beautiful verses all these men, despite their zeal, cannot, on the basis of the scientific definition itself, be called men of science and art: first, because their activity of science for science’s sake and art for art’s sake has not human welfare in view; and secondly, because we do not see the results of their activity in the welfare of society and of humanity. The fact that from their activity something pleasant and profitable for certain people sometimes results, by no means allows us, according to their own scientific definition, to consider them scientists and artists.
Just in the same way, however people may call themselves who devise applications of electricity to lighting or heating or the transmission of power, or new chemical combinations yielding dynamite or fine colours, or play Beethoven’s symphonies correctly, or perform in theatres and paint good portraits, genre paintings, landscapes or other pictures, or write interesting novels-the aim of which is merely to relieve the dullness of the wealthy classes-these people’s activity cannot be called science and art, because it is not directed, like the brain-activity of an organism, to the welfare of the whole, but is guided merely by personal profit, privileges, and money, received for the inventions and productions of so-called art; and therefore this activity can in no way be separated from every other kind of interested personal activity adding to the pleasure of life, like the activity of restaurant-keepers, jockeys, milliners, prostitutes, and so forth; for the activity of the first, the second, and the third, of these does not come under the definition of science and art which promise on the basis of a division of labour to serve the welfare of mankind or of society.
The definition of science and art given by science is quite correct, but unfortunately the activity of present-day science and art does not come under it. Some of its representatives are doing what is directly harmful, others what is useless, and again others what is insignificant and available only for rich people.
They, are all perhaps very good people, but they do not do what by their own definition they have undertaken to do, and therefore they have as little right to consider themselves scientists and artists as the clergy of to-day, who do not fulfil the duties they have undertaken, have a right to claim to be the bearers and teachers of divine truth.
And it is not difficult to understand why those who are active in science and art to-day do not fulfil, and cannot fulfil, their calling. They do not fulfil it because they have converted their duties into rights.
Scientific and artistic activity in its real sense is only fruitful when it ignores rights and knows only duties. Only because it is always of that kind and its nature is to be self-sacrificing, does humanity value this activity so highly.
Men who are really called to serve others by mental labour will always suffer in performing that service, for only by sufferings as by birth pangs, is the spiritual world brought to birth.
Self-sacrifice and suffering will be the lot of a thinker and an artist because their aim is the welfare of man. People are unhappy, they suffer and perish. There is no time to wait and refresh oneself.
The thinker and artist will never sit on Olympian heights as we are apt to imagine; he will always be in a state of anxiety and agitation; he might discover and utter what would bring blessings to people, might save them from sufferings, but he has not discovered it and has not uttered it, and to-morrow it may be too late-he may have died.
Not that man will be a thinker and artist who is educated in an institution where they profess to produce learned men and artists (but really produce destroyers of science and art) and who obtains a diploma and a competence, but he who would be glad not to think and not to express what is implanted in his soul, but cannot help doing what he is impelled to by two irresistible forces-an inner necessity and the demands of men.
Plump self-satisfied thinkers and
