dominant feeling was or rather would have been hatred, if Tolstoy had not forbidden himself to hate anything whatever. He detested it doubly, because Socialism was the amalgamation of two lies: the lie of liberty and the lie of science. Does it not profess to be founded upon some sort of economic science, whose laws absolutely rule the progress of the world?
Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has pages full of terrible irony concerning this modern superstition and “these futile problems: the origin of species, spectrum analysis, the nature of radium, the theory of numbers, animal fossils and other nonsense, to which people attach as much importance to-day as they attributed in the Middle Ages to the Immaculate Conception or the Duality of Substance.” He derides these “servants of science, who, just as the servants of the Church, persuade themselves and others that they are saving humanity; who, like the Church, believe in their own infallibility, never agree among themselves, divide themselves into sects, and, like the Church, are the chief cause of unmannerliness, moral ignorance, and the long delay of humanity in freeing itself from the evils under which it suffers; for they have rejected the only thing that could unite humanity: the religious conscience.”[1]
- ↑ War and Revolution.
In Resurrection, at the hearing of Maslova’s appeal, in the Senate, it is a materialistic Darwinist who is most strongly opposed to the revision, because he is secretly shocked that Nekhludov should wish, as a matter of duty, to marry a prostitute; any manifestation of duty, and still more, of religious feeling, having the effect upon him of a personal insult.
