decide it thus: that division of labor is right only when a special
branch of man's activity is so needful to men, that they, entreating
him to serve them, voluntarily propose to support him in requital
for that which he shall do for them. But, when a man can live from
infancy to the age of thirty years on the necks of others, promising
to do, when he shall have been taught, something extremely useful,
for which no one asks him; and when, from the age of thirty until
his death, he can live in the same manner, still merely on the
promise to do something, for which there has been no request, this
will not be division of labor (and, as a matter of fact, there is no
such thing in our society), but it will be what it already is,--
merely the appropriation, by force, of the toil of others; that same
appropriation by force of the toil of others which the philosophers
formerly designated by various names,--for instance, as
indispensable forms of life,--but which scientific science now calls
the organic division of labor.

The whole significance of scientific science lies in this alone. It
has now become a distributer of diplomas for idleness; for it alone,
in its sanctuaries, selects and determines what is parasitical, and
what is organic activity, in the social organism. Just as though
every man could not find this out for himself much more accurately
and more speedily, by taking counsel of his reason and his
conscience. It seems to men of scientific science, that there can
be no doubt of this, and that their activity is also indubitably
organic; they, the scientific and artistic workers, are the brain
cells, and the most precious cells in the whole organism.

Ever since men--reasoning beings--have existed, they have
distinguished good from evil, and have profited by the fact that men