"Science, thank God, has had her day," says Mikhail Fiodorovich very slowly. "She has had her swan-song. Ye-es. Mankind has begun to feel the desire to replace her by something else. She was grown from the soil of prejudice, fed by prejudices, and is now the same quintessence of prejudices as were her bygone grandmothers: alchemy, metaphysics and philosophy. As between European scholars and the Chinese who have no sciences at all the difference is merely trifling, a matter only of externals. The Chinese had no scientific knowledge, but what have they lost by that?"
"Flies haven't any scientific knowledge either," I say; "but what does that prove?"
"It's no use getting angry, Nicolai Stiepanich. I say this only between ourselves. I'm more cautious than you think. I shan't proclaim it from the housetops, God forbid! The masses still keep alive a prejudice that science and art are superior to agriculture and commerce, superior to crafts. Our persuasion makes a living from this prejudice. It's not for you and me to destroy it. God forbid!"
During patience the younger generation also comes in for it.
"Our public is degenerate nowadays," Mikhail Fiodorovich sighs. "I don't speak of ideals and such things, I only ask that they should be able to work and think decently. 'Sadly I look at the men of our time'--it's quite true in this connection."
"Yes, they're frightfully degenerate," Katy agrees. "Tell me, had you one single eminent person under you during the last five or ten years?"
"I don't know how it is with the other professors,--but somehow I don't recollect that it ever happened to me."
"In my lifetime I've seen a great many of your students and young scholars, a great many actors.... What happened? I never once had the luck to meet, not a hero or a man of talent, but an ordinarily interesting person. Everything's dull and incapable, swollen and pretentious...."
All these conversations about degeneracy give me always the impression that I have unwittingly overheard an unpleasant conversation about my daughter. I feel offended because the indictments are made wholesale and are based upon such ancient hackneyed commonplaces and such penny-dreadful notions as degeneracy, lack of ideals, or comparisons with the glorious past. Any indictment, even if it's made in a company of ladies, should be formulated with all possible precision; otherwise it isn't an indictment, but an empty calumny, unworthy of decent people.