“It is always immoral. For the most part, when there are various ways of relieving the patient, oxygen, etc., it is difficult to abstain from using them; but it would be better if they did not exist. We shall all die without fail, and the doctors’ activity is directed towards fighting death. But to die--in ten days or in ten years--is all the same. How terrible it is that it is always concealed from the patient that he is dying! We are none of us accustomed to look death in the face!” Usov defended the activity of doctors, considering it a useful one. Tolstoi said: “It is for this reason that I consider the activity of doctors harmful: people are crowded in towns; they are infected with syphilis and consumption; they are kept in terrible conditions, and then millions are spent on the establishment of hospitals and clinics. But why not spend that energy, not in curing people, but in improving the conditions of their lives? While numbers of healthy, useful peasants are infected with all sorts of diseases, and are worn out by work beyond their strength, so that they die at thirty instead of seventy, some useless old woman who is quite incurable has spent upon her all the treatment that medicine can supply. “All modern sciences do the very opposite of what they set out to do. Theology hides moral truths, jurisprudence obscures in every possible way the conception of justice, the natural sciences teach materialism, and history distorts the true life of the people. Darwin’s theory is in agreement with the crude fable of Moses. All discussions on Darwinism are polemics against Moses. “Every young man growing up in Russia passes through a terrible contagion, a sort of moral syphilis; in the first place, the Orthodox Church, and then, when he frees himself from that, the doctrines of materialism. The best physiologists, like Krafft-Ebing or Claude Bernard, openly admit that, however carefully we investigate even a simple cell, there is always some _x_ in its composition which we do not understand. Consequently the complex of organisms and the social conditions of life are an _x_ raised to the _x_ degree. And if we cannot investigate a cell completely, then how can we realize the laws which govern the life of human societies? Yet some blockhead like B. assures us that it is all very simple, and the science of history can deduce immutable laws by which human life is shaped.