WHAT IS REUGION? 319
advantage from these inventions and improvements — some crumbs — do reach the working classes^ this is not at all because they were intended for the people, but only because by their nature they could not be kept from the people.
It is the same with medical science, which has ad- vanced in its false direction till it has reached a stage at which only the rich can command it ; while from their manner of life and their poverty (and as a result of the fact that the questions relating to the amelioration of the life of the poor have been neglected) the mass of the people can only avail themselves of it under conditions that most clearly show how medical science has diverged from its true purpose.
But this avoidance and perversion of essential ques- tions is most strikingly seen in what is now called Philosophy. There would seem to be one essential question for philosophy to answer : ' ^^lat must I do ?' And in the philosophy of the Christian nations answers to this question — though combined with very much that is unnecessary and confused, as in the case of Spinoza, Kant (in his Critique of Practical Reason), Schopenhauer, and particularly Rousseau — have at any rate been given. But latterly, since Hegel (who tauffht that whatever exists is reasonable) the question : ' ^^'hat must we do }' has been pushed into the back- ground, and philosophy directs its whole attention to the investigation of things as they are, and to making them fit into a prearranged theory, Tliat was the first downward step. The next step, leading human thought to a yet lower level, was the acknowledgment of the law of the struggle for existence as fundamental, merely because that strusrgle can be observed among plants and animals. Under the influence of that theory, it is assumed that the destruction of the weakest is a law which should not be checked. Finally came the third step, when the semi-sane Nietzsche's puerile efforts at originality, which do not even present anything complete or coherent, but are as it were immoral, offhand jottings of utterly baseless thoughts.
