Man will not, as now, eat an egg laid by a hen he has kept, or bread grown on his field, or an apple from a tree he has reared and which has blossomed and matured in his sight; but he will eat tasty, nutritious, food which will be prepared in laboratories by the conjoint labour of many people in which he will take a small part. Man will hardly need to labour, so that all men will be able to yield to idleness as the upper, ruling classes now yield to it. Nothing shows more plainly than these ideals to what a degree the science of our times has deviated from the true path. The great majority of men in our times lack good and sufficient food (as well as dwellings and clothes and all the first necessaries of life). And this great majority of men is compelled, to the injury of its well-being, to labour continually beyond its strength. Both these evils can easily be removed by abolishing mutual strife, luxury, and the unrighteous distribution of wealth, in a word by the abolition of a false and harmful order and the establishment of a reasonable, human manner of life. But science considers the existing order of things to be as immutable as the movements of the planets, and therefore assumes that the purpose of science is—not to elucidate the falseness of this order and to arrange a new, reasonable way of life—but, under the existing order of things, to feed everybody and enable all to be as idle as the ruling classes, who live a depraved life, now are. And, meanwhile, it is forgotten that nourishment with corn, vegetables, and fruit raised from the soil by one’s own labour is the pleasantest, healthiest, easiest, and most natural nourishment, and that the work of using one’s muscles is as necessary a condition of life as is the oxidation of the blood by breathing. To invent means whereby people might, while continuing our false division of property and labour, be well nourished by means of chemically-prepared food, and might make the forces of nature work for them, is like inventing means to pump oxygen into the lungs of a man kept in a closed chamber the air of which is bad, when all that is needed is to cease to confine the man in the closed chamber.