uld have to work more than two or three hours a day. If all of us,
rich and poor, worked three hours a day the rest of our time would be
free. And then to be still less dependent on our bodies, we should
invent machines to do the work and we should try to reduce our demands
to the minimum. We should toughen ourselves and our children should not
be afraid of hunger and cold, and we should not be anxious about their
health, as Anna, Maria, Pelagueya were anxious. Then supposing we did
not bother about doctors and pharmacies, and did away with tobacco
factories and distilleries--what a lot of free time we should have! We
should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all
work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work
together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of
it--truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual,
poignant, depressing fear of death and even of death itself."

"But you contradict yourself," said Lyda. "You talk about service and
deny education."

"I deny the education of a man who can only use it to read the signs on
the public houses and possibly a pamphlet which he is incapable of
understanding--the kind of education we have had from the time of
Riurik: and village life has remained exactly as it was then. Not
education is wanted but freedom for the full development of spiritual
capacities. Not schools are wanted but universities."

"You deny medicine too."

"Yes. It should only be used for the investigation of diseases, as
natural phenomenon, not for their cure. It is no good curing diseases if
you don't cure their causes. Remove the chief cause--physical labour,
and there will be no diseases. I don't acknowledge the science which
cures," I went on excitedly. "Science and art, when they are true, are
directed not to temporary or private purposes, but to the eternal and
the general--they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God,
the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,
like pharmacies and libraries, then they only complicate and encumber
life. We have any number of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, and highly
educated people, but we have no biologists, mathematicians,
philosophers, poets. All our intellectual and spiritual energy is wasted
on temporary passing needs.... Scientists, writers, painters work and
work, and thanks to them the comforts of life grow greater every day,
the de