"In the first place," he retorted, "the prime requisite in that connection is experience of life; and, in the second place, the study of detached personalities is scarcely worth the trouble. For all we human beings are alike, in body as in spirit. In each of us there is an identical brain, an identical spleen, an identical heart, an identical pair of lungs, an identical stock of the so-called moral qualities (trifling variations between which we need not take into account). Therefore from a single specimen of the human race may all the rest be judged. In fact, human beings are like trees in a forest. You never find a botanist studying its individual trunks."
Katia, who had been arranging her flowers, glanced at Bazarov in amazement, and, in so doing, encountered his keen, contemptuous gaze, and blushed to her ears. Anna Sergievna shook her head.
"Trees in a forest!" she exclaimed. "Think you, then, that there is no difference between the wise man and the fool, the good and the bad?"
"No, I do not," replied Bazarov. "On the contrary, I believe that such differences do exist. The point is that they exist only as between the sound and the ailing. For instance, a consumptive's lungs are not as yours and mine; yet they have been fashioned precisely as our own have been. Also, whereas, to a certain extent, we know whence bodily disorders arise, moral disorders come of faulty education, the thousand and one follies with which the human brain is afflicted, in short, any irregular condition of the social body. Rectify that body, and moral sickness will soon cease to be."
Speaking as though he were saying to himself, "Believe me or not as you like, it is all one to me," Bazarov drew his long fingers through his whiskers, while his eyes glowed like coals.
"Then you think," pursued Anna Sergievna, "that, once the social body has been rectified, stupid and evil people will cease to exist?"
"At all events, once the social body is properly organised, the fact that a man be wise or stupid, good or bad, will cease to be of importance."
"Ah! I understand! That is because we all possess an identical spleen?"
"Precisely so, madam."
She turned to Arkady.