ary education when a man has nothing to read but the signs
on public houses and sometimes books which he cannot understand--
such education has existed among us since the times of Rurik; Gogol's
Petrushka has been reading for ever so long, yet as the village was
in the days of Rurik so it has remained. What is needed is not
elementary education, but freedom for a wide development of spiritual
capacities. What are wanted are not schools, but universities."

"You are opposed to medicine, too."

"Yes. It would be necessary only for the study of diseases as natural
phenomena, and not for the cure of them. If one must cure, it should
not be diseases, but the causes of them. Remove the principal cause
--physical labour, and then there will be no disease. I don't
believe in a science that cures disease," I went on excitedly. "When
science and art are real, they aim not at temporary private ends,
but at eternal and universal--they seek for truth and the meaning
of life, they seek for God, for the soul, and when they are tied
down to the needs and evils of the day, to dispensaries and libraries,
they only complicate and hamper life. We have plenty of doctors,
chemists, lawyers, plenty of people can read and write, but we are
quite without biologists, mathematicians, philosophers, poets. The
whole of our intelligence, the whole of our spiritual energy, is
spent on satisfying temporary, passing needs. Scientific men,
writers, artists, are hard at work; thanks to them, the conveniences
of life are multiplied from day to day. Our physical demands increase,
yet truth is still a long way off, and man still remains the most
rapacious and dirty animal; everything is tending to the degeneration
of the majority of mankind, and the loss forever of all fitness for
life. In such conditions an artist's work has no meaning, and the
more talented he is, the stranger and the more unintelligible is
his position, as when one looks into it, it is evident that he is
working for the amusement of a rapacious and unclean animal, and
is supporting the existing order. And I don't care to work and I
won't work. . . . Nothing is any use; let the earth sink to perdition!"

"Misuce, go out of the room!" said Lida to her sister, apparently
thinking my words pernicious to the young girl.

Genya looked mournfully at her mother and sister, and went out of
the room.

"These are the charming things people say when they want to justify
their indifference," sa