"And so you have no feeling whatsoever for art?" she said, leaning her elbow on the table, a movement which brought her face closer to Bazarov. "How can you get on without it?"
"Why, what is it needed for, may I ask?"
"Well, at least to help one to know and understand people."
Bazarov smiled.
"In the first place, experience of life does that, and in the second, I assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves. All men are similar, in soul as well as in body. Each of us has a brain, spleen, heart and lungs of similar construction; and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us- the slight variations are of no importance. It is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others. People are like trees in a forest: no botanist would dream of studying each individual birch-tree."
Katya, who was arranging the flowers one by one in a leisurely way, lifted her eyes to Bazarov with a puzzled look, and meeting his quick casual glance she blushed to her ears. Anna Sergeyevna shook her head.
"The trees in a forest," she repeated. "According to you, then, there is no difference between a stupid and an intelligent person, or between a good and a bad one?"
"Oh, yes, there is: it's like the difference between the sick and the healthy. The lungs of the consumptive are not in the same condition as yours and mine, though they are constructed on the same lines. We know more of less what causes physical ailments; and moral diseases are caused by the wrong sort of education, by all the rubbish people's heads are stuffed with from childhood onwards, in short by the disordered state of society. Reform society and there will be no diseases."
Bazarov said all this looking as though he were thinking aloud to himself: "Believe me or not as you like, it makes no odds to me!" He slowly passed his long fingers over his side-whiskers, while his eyes strayed round the room.
"And you suppose," said Anna Sergeyevna, "that when society is reformed there will no longer be any stupid or wicked people?"
"At any rate, in a properly organized society it won't matter a joy whether a man is stupid or clever, bad or good."
"Yes, I see. They will all have identical spleens."
"Precisely, madame."