The Life and Teaching of Leo Tolstoy; A Book of Extracts (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1904. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE Work for science? But the word science is a term so vague and ill-defined that what some people consider to be science is considered by others to be utterly futile, and this is the case not only with outsiders but even with the priests of science themselves. While those savants who favour a spiritual explanation of life look upon jurisprudence, philosophy, and even theology as the most necessary and important of sciences, the Positivists consider these very sciences as childish twaddle devoid of scientific value; and vice versd, sociology, which the Positivists look upon as the science of sciences, is considered by the theologians, philosophers, and spiritualists as an arbitrary and useless collection of observations and assertions. But more than this, even in one and the same branch of philosophy or natural science each system has ardent defenders and equally ardent detractors, equally competent, yet holding diametrically opposite opinions. Finally, does not each year witness fresh scientific discoveries, which, after exciting the wonder of the mediocrities of the whole world, and bringing fame and fortune to their inventors, are eventually found to be nothing but ridiculous errors even by those who promulgated them? Just as it was not exactly in the creation of the world in six days, the wound-curing serpent, etc., that the Hebrew believed, but rather in the infallibility of his priests, and hence in the truth of their assertions, even so the great majority of the cultured people of our time believe neither in the formation of the world by rotation, nor in heredity, nor in comma-bacilli, but in the infallibility of their lay priests who are called scientists, who affirm whatever they pretend to know with the same assurance as...