SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



must adopt are not at first sight a direct consequence of his own 

 fijndamental axioms, but embody themselves in a social theory 

 external to his own sphere. Hence the dual character of the scientific 

 worker, as scientist and as citizen. Hence the temptation for him to 

 shirk his public responsibilities and as "pure clerk" to be silent except 

 when he gives the results of his own exact researches. 



We may remember the bitter words said to have been prefixed by 

 the mathematician, G. H. Hardy, to a book on pure mathematics: 

 "This subject has no practical value, that is to say, it cannot be used 

 to accentuate the present inequalities in the distribution of wealth or 

 to promote directly the destruction of human life." 



Perhaps the most important task before scientific thinkers to-day 

 is to show in detail how the ethics of collectivism do in fact emerge 

 from what we know of the world and the evolutionary process that 

 has taken place in it. Scientific socialism (I believe) is the only 

 form of socialism which has the future before it; its theoreticians 

 must therefore s'how not only that high levels of human social organi- 

 sation have arisen and will arise by a continuation of the natural 

 process, but what are the ethics appropriate to them. Scientific ethics 

 should be to communist society what catholic ethics were to feudal 

 society and protestant ethics to capitalist society. 



Theology and the Modern Man. 



In the preceding section I said that a doctrine of God was apparently 

 absent from communist thought. I used the word "apparently" 

 because {a) dialectical materialism might be logically compatible with 

 a spinozistic theology;^ (^) the immanence of the christian Godhead 

 as Love is better provided for in communism than in any other order 

 of human relationships. Future communist Clements of Alexandria 

 will have the task of codifying the praeparatio evangelica of the 

 christian centuries. 



Today we are all Taoists and Epicureans. For the taoists, the Way 

 of Nature was tiu-jan (g ^); it came of itself. So also in Lucretius' 

 great poem^: 



"... natura videtur 

 libera continuo dominis privata superbis 

 ipsa sua per se sponte omnia dis agere expers." 



^ Cf. Moscow Dialogues by J. Hecker (London, 1933), p. ^^, ^nd Fundamental Prob- 

 lems of Marxism, by G. Plekhanov (ed. D. Riazanov, London, 1928), pp. 9 ff. 

 ^ De Rer. Nat. II, 1090. 



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