EVOLUTION
OCIAL AND ORGANIC
BY
ARTHUR M. LEWIS
THIRD EDITION
80
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1908
CONTENTS
Page
I THALES TO LINNAEUS 7
II LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 24
III DARWIN'S "NATURAL SELECTION" 38
IV WEISMANN'S THEORY OP HEREDITY. GO
V DE VRIES' "MUTATION" 81
VI KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID" 97
VII A REPLY TO HAECKE^L 115
VIII SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 133
IX SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM ..^ 149
X CIVILIZATION — WARD AND DIETZGEN ... 168
LOAN STACK
^TTJ^
:ii
K6
PREFACE.
The contents of this volume consist of the
first ten lectures of the thirty-five in the Win-
ter course of 1907-08. They were delivered in
the Garrick Theater, Chicago, on Sunday morn-
ings to crowded houses. On several occasions
half as many people were turned away as
managed to get in. If these lectures meet with
as warm a reception when read as they did
when heard, I shall be more than satisfied. For
a fuller discussion of the Greek period, briefly
dealt with in the first lecture, see Edward
Clodd's *Tioneers of Evolution'^ to which work
the early part of this lecture is greatly indebted.
Every lecture proceeds on the assumption,
that a knowledge of the natural sciences, and
especially the great revolutionizing generaliza-
tions which they have revealed, is indispens-
able to a modern education.
This position is by no means new. It per-
vades the classic literature of Socialism
throughout. Liebknecht, speaking of Marx
and himself says: "Soon we were on the field
of Natural Science, and Marx ridiculed the
victorious reaction in Europe that fancied it
had smothered the revolution and did not
L 907
4 PREFACE
suspect that Natural Science was preparing a
new revolution/'
The only thing I have succeeded in doing
which is at all new, is presenting these so-
called heavy subjects in a way that attracts
and retains a large and enthusiastic audience
Sunday after Sunday eight months of the year.
These lectures, nothwithstanding their
phenomenal success, have aroused some oppo-
sition, in certain quarters among Socialists.
This opposition arises almost wholly from the
fact that the Socialists in question have yet to
learn what their own standard literature con-
tains. When they make that discovery they
will be obliged to do one of two things, reject
the Socialist* philosophy or cease opposing its
public presentation.
A second thought will show that they may
do neither. There is a type of brain the
specimens of which are very numerous, which
seems to possess the faculty of keeping differ-
ent kinds of knowledge and contradictory
ideas, in separate, water-tight compartments.
Thus, as these ideas never come together there
is no collision.
The most conspicuous example of this is the
man who accepts and openly proclaims the
truth of the materialistic conception of history
— the theory that, among other things, explains
PREFACE 6
the origin, functions, and changes of religion,
just as it does those of law — yet the very man
who boasts of his concurrence in this epoch-
making theory, using one lobe of his brain,
will', while using the other lobe, and with still
greater fervency, maintain that the Socialist
philosophy has nothing to do with religion at
all, but is an "economic" question only. The
left lobe knows not what the right lobe is
doing. Dietzgen described these Comrades as
"dangerous muddle-heads.'' He might have
omitted the adjective. A brain of this order
renders its possessor harmless.
These well-meaning friends have offered a
great deal of advice as to how to conduct our
meeting without "driving people away." Yet
strangely enough our audience grew by leaps
and bounds, until from seventy-five at the
first lecture we are now crowding and often
overcrowding one of the largest and finest
theaters inside the loop. Meanwhile they
followed their own advice and saw what was
at the beginning a fine audience of five hundred
grow less and less until it is less than fifty and
sometimes falls below thirty. This does not
seem to justify the cry that the working class
is hungering for Christian Socialism.
Further volumes of these lectures will carry
e PREFACE
the theories of Socialism into yet other fields
of science and philosophy.
In conclusion let me ask a certain type of
correspondents to save my time and their own.
They say they agree with my views entirely;
there is no question but I am right. And the
lectures would be in place if delivered before
university men. But workingmen (my top-
lofty correspondents not included of course)
have so many ignorant prejudices that fearless
scientific teaching is not acceptable to them.
The size of my audience is sufficient disproof
of the last statement. As to the rest, it is just
the existence of ignorant prejudices that makes
the fearless teaching of science necessary.
Again, I have yet to be convinced that there is
any kind of knowledge which is good for
university men, but unfit for workingmen.
Moreover, I positively refuse to have one kind
of knowledge for myself, and another to give
out to my audience. This is the fundamental
principle of priestcraft, and the working class
has had far too much of it already.
On this ground — that there is nothing higher
than reality, that Socialism is in harmony with
all reality and that in the end reality must
triumph — the future lectures of these courses
will stand or fall. Arthur M. Lewis.
Chicago, Dec. 27, '07.
EVOLUTION,
SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
h
THALES TO LINNAEUS.
"Early ideas/' says Herbert Spencer, "are
usually vague adumbrations of the truth/' and
however numerous may be the exceptions, this
was undoubtedly the case with the evolu-
tionary speculations of the ancient Greeks.
The greatness of that remarkable republic finds
one of its most striking manifestations in the
fact that so many great modern ideas trace
their ancestry back to Greece. Sir Henry
Maine, the historical jurist, said that, "except
the blind forces of nature, nothing moves that
is not Greek in its origin." Compared with her
dreamy oriental neighbors, Greece shone like a
meteor in a moonless night. As Professor
Burnet says, "They left off telling tales. They
gave up the hopeless task of describing what
was, when as yet there was nothing, and asked
instead what all things really are now,'' while
the Oriental shrunk from the search after
7
3 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly
remarks "on each fresh gain of earth as so
much robbery of heaven."
The Greeks very largely discarded the theo-
logical mind, peopled with its pious phantasms,
and sought to probe into the nature of the
material universe. This is why we discover a
fairly distinct, and sometimes startlingly clear
"adumbration" of the theory of evolution
running like a chain of gold through the im-
mortal fragments of their greatest thinkers.
What is it that really is, and what that only
seems to be? What is real, and what is only
apparent? This is the theme which Greek phi-
losophy has in common with modern thought,
and this is why the remnants of Greek litera-
ture are so precious in the twentieth century.
Thales, of Miletus, in Asia Minor, is con-
ceded to have been the founder of Greek phi-
losophy. "He asserted water to be the principle
of all things," says Diogenes Laertius, and he
regarded all life as coming from water, a po-
sition by no means foreign to modern science.
Anaximander, also a Milesian and a younger
contemporary of Thales, who like him flour-
ished between 500 and 600 B. C., said that the
material cause of all things was the Infinite.
"It is neither water nor any other of what are
now called the elements, but a substance
THALES TO LINNAEUS 9
different from them which is infinite, from
which arise all the heavens and the worlds
within them." "Man," he boldly asserts, "is
like another animal, namely, a fish, in the be-
ginning," a shrewd guess which is now an
established fact.
Anaximenes, the third and last of the
Milesian philosophers, while following his
predecessors closely in time, disagreed with
them as to the raw material of the universe.
He declares it to be air which, "when it is
dilated so as to be rarer becomes fire while
winds, on the other hand, are condensed air,
Cloud is formed from air by 'felting' and this,
still further condensed, becomes water. Water,
condensed still more, turns to earth ; and when
condensed as much as it can be, to stones."
All of which proves that Anaximenes had a
very fertile brain.
Herakleitos, one of the greatest of all Greek
thinkers, lived for a time at Ephesus and ex-
pressed the following forceful opinion of his
fellow citizens : "The Ephesians would do well
to hang themselves, every grown man of them,
and leave the city to beardless youths ; for they
have cast out Hermodoros, the best man
among them, saying: 'We will have none who
is best among us ; if there be any such, let him
be so elsewhere and among others.' " Accord-
10 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
ing to him everything comes from and returns
to fire and "all things are in a state of flux like
a river/' Here is the intellectual ancestor of
Hegel with his great saying. "Nothing is,
everything is becoming." Herakleitos sagac-
iously observed: "You cannot step twice into
the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flow-
ing in upon you."
Parmenides, born at Elea about 515 B. C,
was poet and philosopher both, and insisted in
his hexameter verse that the universe is a
unity, which neither came out of nothing, nor
could, in any degree, pass away, thus anti-
cipating by over 2,000 years Lavoisier's
doctrine of the permanence of matter.
Empedocles, of Akragas in Sicily, about the
same time, stated this great truth with still
greater force and clearness : "Fools ! — for they
have no far-reaching thoughts — who deem that
what before was not, comes into being or that
aught can perish and be utterly destroyed. For
it cannot be that aught can arise from what in
no way is, and it is impossible and unheard of
that what is should perish ; for it will always
be, wherever one may keep putting it." He
also endeavored to combine and reconcile the
ideas of some of his predecessors, teaching that
all things come from four roots— water, air,
fire and earth.
THALES TO LINNAEUS It
Anaxagoras, born about 500 B. C, was the
first Greek to suffer for science. He was
brought to trial for asserting the sun to be a
red hot stone, and it would have probably gone
hard with him had not the mighty Pericles
been his friend. If the sun was merely a fiery
ball, what became of the religion founded on
the worship of Apollo?
Nearly a half a century earlier Xenophanes,
of Colophon, had ventilated ideas much
more obnoxious to the priests. He had
done for his age what Feuerbach did
to the Nineteenth century — he had explained
the origin of the gods by Anthropomorphism.
Said he: "If oxen or lions had hands,
and could paint with their hands and pro-
duce works of art as men do, horses would
paint the forms of the gods like horses and
oxen like oxen. Each would represent them
with bodies according to the form of each. So
the Ethiopians make their gods black and
snubnosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair
and blue eyes." Had Xenophanes lived at
Athens, where a religious revival had just
taken place, he would have shared the fate
which later overtook the impious Socrates.
Luckily for Xenophanes, in the colony where
he lived "the gods were left to take care of
themselves." Anaxagoras was the first to
12 EVOLUTION. SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
determine what causes the eclipses and the
illumination of the moon : — "The moon has not
a light of her own but gets it from the sun.
The moon is eclipsed by the earth screening
the sun's light from it. The sun is eclipsed at
the new moon, when the moon screens it from
us."
The Pythagoreans who must be distin-
guished from the medicine man Pythagoras,
from whom they only take their name indirect-
ly, and not as disciples, believed the reality of
the universe was to be found in numbers.
They were deceived into this absurdity by the
exactness of mathematical conclusions. This
was excusable among the Greeks to whom
arithmetical combinations were as wonderful
as electrical phenomena are to us, but its re-
vival in our day by astrologers and theo-
sophists has no such justification.
Socrates, born about 470 B. C, at Athens, is
described as "pug-nosed, thick-lipped, big-
bellied and bulging-eyed" — the very opposite
of the Greek ideal of beauty. He believed that
knowledge itself would bring virtue, and
sought to discover the true ground of knowl-
edge. His search brought him into conflict
with the religious bigotry of his day and he
was finally sentenced to death and died from
drinking hemlock in 399 B. C. He wrote
THALES TO LINNAEUS 18
nothing and his work is preserved mainly
through his influence on Plato.
Leukippos and Demokritos are linked to-
gether through their statements of the atomic
theory, made more than twenty centuries be-
fore Dalton. They placed the permanent
reality of things in numberless atoms, of which
Leukippos said "there are an infinite number
of them, and they are invisible owing to the
smallness of their bulk."
Plato we shall pass by ; his metaphysical doc-
trine of ideas contributed little of value to the
solution of the riddle of the universe.
We now come to the great Stagirite, Arist-
otle, founder of the experimental school and
father of natural history. Born in 384 B. C, he
entered the Academy under Plato when a boy
of eighteen. When he was thirty-six Plato
died, and Aristotle then left Athens. At forty-
one he became the teacher of Alexander the
Great. He was the greatest of all the Greeks,
and his studies took a wider range than had
been embraced by any previous thinker.
Stageira, where he spent his boyhood, was
on the Strynomid gulf, and here he observed
the variations and gradations between marine
plants and animals. It is an evidence of his
keen insight that he classified the sponge as an
animal. Compare this with Agassiz, the op-
14 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
ponent of Darwinism, who, in the 19th century,
declared the sponge to be a vegetable.
Aristotle insisted on observation and experi-
ence as the foundation of knowledge. "We
must not accept a general principle from logic
only, but must prove its application to each
fact. For it is in facts we must seek general
principles, and these must always accord with
facts." He repudiated the idea of purpose in
nature, saying, "Jupiter rains not that corn may
be increased, but from necessity." He came
very near Von Mohl's protoplasm when he
said, "Germs should have been first produced,
and not immediately animals; and that soft
mass which first subsisted was the germ."
Passing over the much misrepresented Epi-
curus we come two centuries later to the
illustrious Roman poet philosopher, Lucretius.
In this last century preceeding the Christian
era, Greece had fallen from her high estate and
become a Roman province. But while Rome
had annexed Greece, Greek learning had con-
quered the Roman mind.
Lucretius in his poem, "The System of Na-
ture," expounds, with great force, the atomic
theory of his Greek forerunners. The first
anthropologist, he comes so near to Spencer
and Tylor that his ideas, and sometimes even
his sentences smack of the 19th century. "The
THALES TO LINNAEUS 15
past history of man " he asserts, "lies in no
heroic or golden age, but in one struggle out
of savagery/' Of the origin of language he
says, "Nature impelled them to utter the
various sounds of the tongue, and use struck
out the names of things," Of the early
struggles of primitive men he says, "Man's
first arms were hands, nails and teeth and
stones and boughs broken off from the forests,
and flame and fire, as soon as they had become
known. Afterward the force of iron and copper
was discovered, and the use of copper was
known before that of iron, as its nature is
easier to work, and it is found in greater
quantity. With copper they would labor the
soil of the earth and stir up the billows of war. .
Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained
ground and the make of the copper sickle be-
came a byword." The name of Lucretius
closes the long line of the evolutionary pion-
eers of the ancient world. There the golden
vein ceases so far as thinking is concerned, not
to reappear until many centuries have passed.
With the decline and fall of the Roman em-
pire, and the rise to power of Christianity,
learning was driven from Europe and found
refuge among the Arabians. This brings us
to the dark or middle ages. It is in the inter-
pretation of the phenomena of this period, that
16 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
bourgeois free thinkers like Clodd and Draper
break down. They tacitly assume that in
Europe evolution was suspended for over a
thousand years ; and all because of the Christ-
ian church. They fail to recognize that deeper
cause, the medieval form of wealth production,
which gave the church its power to repress
learning in the interest of the lords of the land,
among which the church herself was greatest ;
owning as she did one-third of the soil of
Europe.
The bourgeois radical cannot perceive that
during this period social processes were being
gradually transformed and that an economic
foundation was being laid that would make
possible the renaissance and put science in an
impregnable position, and make the pro-
gressive acceptance of evolution inevitable.
Engels says : "The Middle Ages were reckoned
as a mere interruption of history by a thou-
sand years of bararism. The great advances
of the Middle Ages — the broadening of
European learning, the bringing into existence
of great nations, which arose, one after the
other, and finally the enormous technical ad-
vances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
— all this no one saw".
But it cannot be denied that this was a
terrible period for any thinker who had the
THALES TO LINNAEUS 17
misfortune to be born in it. All that was great
and noble in the thought of Greece and Rome
was rigorously suppressed. The "perfecting
principle" of Aristotle was wrested to theolog-
ical uses. An emaciated form of his philosophy,
and a literal interpretation of the scriptures,
constituted the only permissible studies. Out-
side this dilution of Aristotle, the only thing in
Greek thought which appealed to the medieval
mind was the Pythagorean mystical use of
numbers. The conclusions reached by that
method were truly remarkable, especially when
we remember that they engaged such notable
men as Augustine, the celebrated Bishop of
Hippo.
These are examples : Because there are three
persons in the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost, three orders in the church, bishops
priests and deacons; three degrees of attain-
ment, light, purity and knowledge; three
virtues, faith, hope and charity, and three eyes
in a honeybee; therefore, there can only be
three colors, red, yellow and blue. Because
there were seven churches in the apocalypse,
seven golden candlesticks, seven cardinal
virtues, seven deadly sins and seven sacra-
ments; therefore, there could only be seven
planets and seven metals. Because there were
seventy-two disciples and seventy-two inter-
18 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
preters of the old testament and seventy-two
mystical names of God; therefore there must
be no more and no less than seventy-two joints
in the human body.
During this period, European cities had no
paving or lighting, and one could not step
from a doorway in London or Paris without
plunging ankle deep in mud. They had pract-
ically no drainage and they were, at frequent
intervals devastated by the plague. But the
cities of Andalusia, built and governed by the
Moors in Spain, were drained, well lighted and
solidly paved. They had public libraries and
public schools. From their medical colleges
Europe obtained the only doctors it had.
In the cities of Christian Europe these en-
lightened people were treated like dogs, while
in their wonderful cities, visiting Christians
were met with a hospitality and broad tolera-
tion wholly exceptional in the middle ages.
In Europe, even toward the close of this
period, broad, scientific thinking was im-
possible. Nicholas Copernicus, in the i6th
century, afraid of the faggot, carried as a
secret locked in his own bosom, that helio-
centric theory which is the foundation of
modern astronomy. His great disciple Gior-
dano Bruno, for expounding that theory with
rare ability, after it was revealed by the great
THALES TO LINNAEUS 19
Prussian, was hunted through Europe like a
wild animal and finally burned at the stake.
For the same reason, the third person in the
trinity of the i6th century's greatest thinkers,
Galileo, was harassed and humiliated, and at
last died a prisoner in his own house.
But all through this period, despite its in-
tellectual stagnation, economic evolution pro-
ceeded, laying the foundation for a new in-
tellectual superstructure. That evolution
manifested itself chiefly in the rise and growth
of a trading class. To the existence of such a
class in its society, the Arabians owed their
greater liberality, and scientific spirit. When
Vasca Da Gama sailed down the west coast of
Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope
into the Indian Ocean, trusting to chance for
the outcome of his voyage, he found the
Arabians directing their vessels by a strange
instrument which we now call the mariner's
compass.
The merchants of Genoa and of Spain dis-
covered that orthodox superstitions did not
help but did seriously injure, their commerce.
As captains for their ships they preferred for
purely economic reasons, men who had become
infected with the ideas of navigation of the
pagan Arabians, to men who took their ideas
of the universe from the city bishop or the
20 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
village priest and kept their ships clos^ to
land, afraid lest they should sail off the edge
of the world, or into that great hole where the
angels put the sun at night, after they had
finished rolling it across the sky.
It was the growth and final triumph of this
trading class, with economic interests and a
mode of wealth production that demanded the
liberation of science, that abolished the thumb-
screw and the stake. Voltaire, Rousseau, and
the encyclopaedists were obnoxious to the
feudal regime, lay and clerical, because they
were the prophets and mouthpieces of the
rising bourgeoisie.
This class, by the emancipation of science,
performed a lasting service to the human race.
The society in which it predominated, at once
produced a prolific crop of great thinkers.
Sweden had Linnaeus, England had Lyell,
Germany had Goethe; but the palm fell to
France. In the revolution France had sup-
pressed the Sorbonne^ that theological institu-
tion which had always shown itself the official
and bitter enemy of science, and she soon after
equipped scientific expeditions, which gave her
the greatest thinkers of that day — Cuvier, St.
Hilaire, and, most illustrious of all that courag-
eous pioneer of modern evolution, Jean La-
marck.
THALES TO LINNAEUS 21
The position of the capitalist class of a
hundred years ago was very different from
that of today. Then it was the harbinger of
progress ; now it is the stronghold of reaction.
Its interests then were very different from its
interests now. Then it was called upon by
destiny to steer society into new waters ; now
destiny bids it, since its task is done, to step
aside that a new hand may grip the wheel.
Then it fought a social order which had had
its day, now it is in the midst of social forces
which it cannot administer. That was its
lusty youth ; this is its doddering old age.
When the Bourgeoisie released science from
feudal chains, it let loose a force that carried it
to victory, but, at that moment, it planted the
germs of its own future destruction. Today it
reverses its attitude and would fain suppress
science or at least prevent its reaching the
proletarian brain. But alas, it is in the grip of
evolutionary processes of which it is merely
a part, and it is bound, more securely than
Prometheus to the rock, to a mode of pro-
duction which makes the education of the
proletariat a relentless necessity. The nation
which keeps its working class in semi-feudal
darkness is ground to pieces by the industrial
competition of its neighbors — it goes to the
wall in the struggle for existence. Thus, in
22 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL. AND ORGANIC
the language of Marx, it is obliged by present
necessity to dig its own future grave.
The same inscrutable power that called it
forth to lead society to a new triumph, now
relegates it to the rear and enthrones in its
place a new class, a propertyless working
class, the child of the wage system, destined
to emancipate itself and, by the same stroke,
the whole human race. If this be not the mis-
sion of the working class, as an instrument of
social evolution, the press and platform of the
Socialist movement is a useless dissipation of
energy. But this is precisely what Marx
proved when he laid the foundation of the
Socialist philosophy.
Every year brings its quota of evidence that
the working class is gathering the political
capacity and the social intelligence necessary
to equip it for this tremendous task.
Norway grew weary of Swedish dominance
and decided to achieve national independence.
At once the Swedish Bourgeoisie began to gird
up its loins for a bloody dynastic war. The
pampered sons of its aristocracy, unable to do
anything useful, were to have glory thrust
upon them, commanding, from the rear,
regiments of Swedish workers to slaughter
and be slaughtered by their exploited Nor-
wegian brothers. But while these sinister
THALES TO LINNAEUS 23
preparations were in full blast, a vast army
of Norwegians crossed the boundary line
into Sweden and met a Swedish army of
the same proportions. There was no blood-
shedding for both armies were unarmed. In
place of bayonets and needle guns they had
their wives and children. They fraternized;
they clasped hands; they tossed each other's
babies in their arms. From that moment war
was impossible. They carried neither the
national banner of Sweden nor of Norway.
Over both those great armies, now become
one, singing their songs of working class
solidarity, there floated the red flag of the
social revolution.
II.
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK.
For a hundred years the word ''progress'' has
been a word to conjure with. No proposal is
too reactionary to be put forward in its name
and the self-admitted conservative explains
that he only wishes to "conserve'' the good
things which progress has bestowed upon us.
It has been invoked on all sides of all
questions, and no superstition was so ancient
or absurd, no theory so exploded, but it could
be revived under a new name and presented to
the world as an infallible sign of the progress
of the age.
But during the last century men have arisen,
who were dissatisfied with a term that covered
everything and meant nothing, and who were
determined to find out what constituted pro-
gress and whether it had any existence in the
world of reality. More has been accomplished
in this respect during that century than in all
the combined previous existence of the human
race. The conception or idea of progress is the
mental reflection of the process of evolution,
which operates everywhere to the remotest
24
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 25
niche or cranny in the material universe. The
only difference between progress and evolu-
tion is that evolution is a more inclusive term,
including as it does phenomena which we
should call retrogressive.
The men who laid the foundations of
modern knowledge, and imparted sense and
force to hitherto meaningless terms, were they
who threw aside theological phantasms and
metaphysical speculations and set themselves
the task of gathering the facts and ascertaining
the laws of the real — the material — world.
This is the method of science, and it is to this
method that we owe all our knowledge of
world problems.
For more than a thousand years this method
was practically suspended. Any attempt, dur-
ing that period, to make use of it was rigor-
ously suppressed, except among the pagan
Arabians. Biological science stood still,
scarcely even marking time. Says Packard
"After Aristotle, no epoch-making zoologist
arose until Linnaeus was born," a yawning
chasm of thirteen hundred years.
Linnaeus, born 1707, in Sweden, was the
greatest naturalist of his time and might have
done greater things for evolutionary ideas had
it not been for the theological influences which
restrained him. But^ hindered as he was, he
26 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
accomplished enough to entitle him to a piace
among the immortals. "He found botany a
chaos," says Prof. Thatcher, "and left it a
unity." His contribution to science consists
mainly in his system of classification and
nomenclature. Before Linnaeus nobody had
been able, though many had tried, to group
and name animal and vegetable forms in such
a manner as to rescue them from utter con-
fusion. This is precisely what Linnaeus did
when, by a happy idea, he adopted what is
called the "binary nomenclature."
This great advance was by no means far-
fetched; it is simply an application of the
double naming everywhere in use, as in the
case of Tom Smith, Fred Smith, James Smith,
in which Smith is used to denote the general
or family name and Fred or Tom the particular
or personal. In the application of this system
to species, Linnaeus reversed the order as we
do when we enter the names of persons on an
alphabetical list, as Smith, Fred and Smith,
James. As illustrations we will take the two
cases, one from the animal and one from the
plant world, selected by Haeckel for the same
purpose. The generic name for cat is Felis.
The common cat is Felis domestica ; the wild-
cat, Felis catus ; the panther, Felis pardus ; the
jaguar, Felis onca; the tiger, Felis tigris; the
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 27
lion, Felis leo. All these second names are the
names of the six species of the one genus —
Felis. As an example in botany take the genus
pine. According to Linnaeus the pine is Pinus
abies; the fir, Pinus picea; the larch, Pinus
larix; the Italian pine, Pinus pinea; the Si-
berian stone pine Pinus cembra; the knee
timber, Pinus mughus; the common pine,
Pinus silvestris. The seven second names ap-
ply to the seven species of the genus Pinus.
But this is not all. Besides grouping the
species into genera, Linnaeus classified certain
genera as belonging to the same "order."
Again he arranged these "orders" in "classes,"
all these classes belonged to one of the two
great "kingdoms," vegetable and animal.
Not only was all this of great practical value
but its theoretical influence has been incalcu-
lable. Linnaeus never saw, and probably
would not have dared to proclaim if he had,
that the resemblances which made his group-
ing possible, indicated a relationship based on
descent from common ancestors. This was
left for men of greater penetration and courage
living in a less theological age. Prelates who
smiled on the obscene debaucheries of Louis
the XV. had Linnaeus' writings prohibited
from papal states, because they proved the
existence of sex in plants.
28 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
Linnaeus not only proved sex in plants but
made it the foundation of his classification. He
also reminds us that plants were known to be
of both sexes by oriental people in early days.
Living as they did on the fruit of the date-
palms they found it necessary to plant male
trees among the females. Their enemies in
war time struck a terrible blow when they cut
down the male trees, thereby reducing them to
famine. Sometimes the inhabitants themselves
destroyed the male trees during impending in-
vasion, so that the enemy should find no
sustenance in their country; a war measure
similar to that of Russians who burned
Moscow in the face of Napoleon.
In the same year that Sweden produced Lin-
naeus, France gave birth to Buffon. Rich and
independent, he chose to devote a long life to
the study of natural history. He had remark-
able powers of research and displayed genius
in presenting the results of his investigation.
But alas! he had less courage than Linnaeus
and he lived nearer that terrible enemy of
eighteenth century science, the theological de-
partment of the University of Paris — the
dreaded Sorbonne.
As long as he confined himself to the mere
description of animals he was a pet of the
church, which seems to have pleased him, but
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 29
when he began to draw evolutionary con-
clusions of real philosophical import and value,
the Sorbonne at once opened its batteries. On
these occasions Buflfon's retreat was prompt
and unprotesting. It might be remembered as
some mitigation of his cowardice that while
the reign of the stake and faggot did not
extend into the i8th century and there was no
danger of the fate of the fearless Bruno, yet
so strong was religious bigotry even in this
period that Rousseau was hunted out of
France, his books burned by the public execu-
tioner, and Diderot went to jail. "Hardly a
single man of letters of that time escaped
arbitrary imprisonment," says John Morley in
his "Rousseau.''
This was all very repugnant to the pride and
vanity of Buflfon and led him to adopt a style
of writing much in vogue a century earlier
when the theological hand was heavy as death.
This method was to put forward the new idea
as a heresy or a mere fancy, explain it, and
then proceed with great show of earnestness to
demolish it in favor of the orthodox view. This
method succeeded admirably until it broke
through the thick skulls of religious bigots
that the case presented for the "heresy" was
more convincing than the pretended reply.
A fine example of this appears in the fourth
80 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
volume of Buffon's "Natural History." "If
we once admit'' says he, "that the ass belongs
to the horse family, and that it only differs
from it because it has been modified, we may
likewise say that the monkey is of the same
family as man, that it is a modified man, that
man and the monkey have had a common
origin like the horse and ass, that each family
has had but a single source, and even that all
the animals have come from a single animal,
which in the succession of ages has produced,
while perfecting and modifying itself, all the
races of other animals If it were
known that in the animals there had been, I
do not say several species, but a single one
which had been produced by modification from
another species ; if it were true that the ass is
only a modified horse, there would be no limit
to the power of nature, and we would not be
wrong in supposing that from a single being
she has known how to derive, with time, all
the other organized beings."
There is no such clear statement of the
evolutionary theory in the "System of Nature'*
of Linnaeus, and if Buffon had proclaimed
these views as his own and courageously de-
fended them, he would have made his name
the greatest of the i8th century, and clothed
himself with immortality. But the stuff of
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 31
martyrs did not enter into his composition, and
the very next passage to the one above, trans-
lated reads — "But no! It is certain from revela-
tion that all animals have alike been favored
with the grace of an act of direct creation, and
that the first pair of every species issued fully
formed from the hands of the creator."
When the Sorbonne thought it was being
fooled it compelled Buffon to recant publicly
and have his recantation printed. In that re-
cantation he announced, "I abandon every-
thing in my book respecting the formation of
the earth and generally all which may be
contrary to the narrative of Moses."
The impression we get from reading Buffon,
is that he did not realize the importance of
those great evolutionary ideas which he stated
so well and repudiated as regularly. Had he
done so and stood by them, he would have
been the Darwin of his day, but he would in
all likelihood have spent the latter part of his
life in the Bastile.
Not until forty years later do we meet the
real and valiant precursor of Darwin, albeit a
countryman of Buffon's, but with a more
profoundly philosophical mind and without his
fear. This was Jean Baptiste Lamarck, born
at Bazentin, France, 1744, and educated at the
college of the Jesuits at Amiens. He served in
82 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
the seven years war and then occupied himself
studying medicine and science at Paris. He
died, poor and blind, in 1829.
Lamarck boldly proclaimed his unshakable
faith in the doctrine of the transformation of
species, and defended it against the strong tide
of popular disfavor and the overwhelming
opposition provoked by the antagonism of the
great zoologist Cuvier. Cuvier's opposition
would have crushed a weaker man but La-
marck bore bravely up and calmly left his case
for the future to decide. Cuvier held species
to be constant, as was consonant with current
and orthodox ideas. This made him a social
favorite and the pet of the church, and honors
were showered profusely upon him to the end
of his days. Not so Lamarck; although born
25 years earlier, his theories were half a
century in advance of Cuvier's, and he paid the
penalty that has so often overtaken those
pioneers whose vision anticipated the future.
"Attacked on all sides," says his friend and
colleague, Geoflfroy St. Hilaire, "injured like-
wise by odious ridicule, Lamarck, too indig-
nant to answer these cutting epigrams, sub-
mitted to the indignity with a sorrowful
patience Lamarck lived a long while
poor, blind, and forsaken, but not by me; I
shall ever love and venerate him." Another
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 33
writer of that period exclaims, "Lamarck, thy
abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is
better than the ephemeral glory of men who
maintain their reputation by sharing in the
errors of their time." As to Cuvier, the one
stain on his career is his unworthy attitude to-
ward his celebrated opponent and fellow
worker. Lamarck had, with his usual generos-
ity, aided and favored him when he first came
to the Museum of Natural History at Paris,
allowing him to hold^ in addition to his own
chair, which was in Vertebrate Zoology, the
chair of Molluscs, which was in Lamarck's
special field, where he had no equal, and which
was properly his. But Lamarck opposed, with
great politeness and without mentioning his
name the attempt made by Cuvier to harmon-
ize science with the orthodox theology of his
day by means of that theory of "cataclysms"
which in spite of its being strenuously de-
fended by so recent a thinker as Agassiz, has
been relegated to the limbo of exploded theo-
ries.
When Lamarck died, Cuvier as his most
notable contemporary was called upon to pro-
nounce his eulogy. What a miserable and un-
worthy performance it was ! Even after death,
religious antipathy — that ever-flowing fountain
of meanness — survived in Cuvier's breast, and
34 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
De Blainville records that "the Academy did
not even allow it to be printed in the form in
which it was pronounced/' and it is said that
portions of it had to be omitted as unfit for
publication. Haeckel, speaking of Lamarck's
great book, "Zoological Philosophy/' com-
plains that "Cuvier, Lamarck's greatest op-
ponent, in his 'Report on the Progress of
Natural Science,' in which the most unim-
portant anatomical investigations are enu-
merated, does not devote a single word to this
work, which forms an epoch in science/'
But history has reversed the scales and
posterity has repaired the wrong. That theory
of biological evolution, which was despised
and rejected by the builders of his day has
become the corner-stone of modern knowledge,
while Cuvier's fantastic "Theory of the Earth''
has gone to the museum of curiosities.
Lamarck's immortality is secured by his
assertion and defense of the theory of descent,
alone. This theory is, that all existing species
have descended from ancestors who were in a
vast number of cases, and ultimately in all,
very different from their present representa-
tives; that this difference is due, not to the
total extinction of the previous species by
"cataclysms," and the divine creation of new
ones, as Cuvier maintained, but because
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 35
previous species changed in adapting them-
selves to a changed environment.
But Lamarck has another claim to a niche
in the Pantheon of Science. As the conviction
gained ground that species were not fixed and
immutable as they came from the hands of an
alleged creator, but were the products of an
evolutionary development extending through
immense periods of time, another question
arose and called for an answer. That question
was — "By what process?''
Charles Darwin is the most illustrious of all
the sons of science because he answered that
question. Lamarck gave an answer, and the
question as to whether that answer is entitled
to be incorporated in the answer of Darwin,
as a supplementary amendment is sometimes
made a part of the motion, still divides the
biological world into two camps. But in that
controversy between the Weismannians and
the Neo-Lamarckians, aptly called "The Battle
of the Darwinians," no matter what becomes
of the Lamarckian factor, all are agreed that
the "Natural Selection" of Darwin is impreg-
nable.
Lamarck's theory may be summed up as
follows —
(i.) Every change in the environment of
animals creates for them new needs.
36 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
(2.) These new needs will compel these
animals to adopt new habits and discard some
old ones, and these needs and habits will pro-
duce and develop new organs.
, (3.) The development or disappearance of
organs depends on their use or disuse.
(4.) The effects of use or disuse, acquired
by animals, are transmitted by heredity to
their offspring.
This fourth factor has split the biological
world since Weismann repudiated it in 1883.
As a typical case of the operation of his
theory, Lamarck gives the following: "The
serpents having taken up the habit of gliding
along the ground, and of concealing them-
selves in the grass, their body, owing to con-
tinually repeated efforts to elongate itself so
as to pass through narrow spaces, has acquired
a considerable length disproportionate to its
size. Moreover limbs would have been very
useless to these animals, and consequently
would not have been employed because long
legs would have interfered with their need of
gliding, and very short legs, not being more
than four in number, would have been in-
capable of moving their body. Hence the lack
of use of these parts having been constant in
the races of these animals, has caused the
total disappearance of these same parts, al-
LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK 37
though really included in the plan of organiza-
tion of animals of their class."
The idea of the serpent getting its long
body, or the giraffe its long neck, or shore
birds their long legs by "stretching," has
brought a good deal of ridicule upon Lamarck's
theory, and that part of it has never been taken
very seriously.
This mistake however, will no more affect
Lamarck's title to a place among the im-
mortals, than will the equally unfortunate
theory of "pangenesis" endanger the status of
his still greater successor — Darwin.
Lamarck's glory is that he boldly proclaimed
and largely proved the general theory of de-
scent — biological evolution.
We shall now proceed to a consideration of
the efforts of the great savants who have suc-
ceeded him, to ascertain its processes.
III.
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION.
In the year 1906, the paper which has the
largest circulation among English Socialists,
"The Clarion," took a vote of its readers as to
whom they considered to be the greatest man,
the man who had contributed most to the
progress of the race, which England had pro-
duced. By an overwhelming majority the
place of honor went to Charles Darwin. That
vote was as much a vindication of English
Socialists as it was of the man whose name
has become almost a synonym for "modern
science."
Liebknecht, in his "Biographical Memoirs
of Karl Marx, speaking of Marx and himself,
says: "When Darwin drew the consequences
of his investigations and presented them to
the public, we spoke for months of nothing else
but Darwin and the revolutionizing power of
his scientific conquests."
Leopold Jacoby writes thus: "The same
year in which appeared Darwin's book (1859)
and coming from a quite different direction, an
identical impulse was given to a very im-
88
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 39
portant development of social science by a
work which long passed unnoticed, and which
bore the title : "Critique of Political Economy"
by Karl Marx — it was the forerunner of
Capital. What Darwin's book on the "Origin
of Species" is on the subject of the genesis and
evolution of organic life from non-sentient
nature up to Man, the work of Marx is on the
subject of the genesis and evolution of associa-
tion among human beings, of States, and the
social forms of humanity."
Commenting on this passage of Jacoby's
Enrico Ferri says: "And this is why Germany,
which has been the most fruitful field for the
development of the Darwinian theories, is
also the most fruitful field for the intelligent,
systematic propaganda of socialist ideas. And
it is precisely for this reason that in Berlin,
in the windows of the book-stores of the so-
cialist propaganda, the works of Charles Dar-
win occupy the place of honor beside those of
Karl Marx."
Frederick Engels, in his reply to Duehring,
speaks of Darwin as follows : "He dealt the
metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest
blow by his proof that all organic beings,
plants, animals, and man himself, are the
products of a process of evolution going on
40 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
through millions of years. In this connection
Darwin must be named before all others."
Again, in the preface to the "Communist
Manifesto" speaking of the materialistic con-
ception of history, he says : "This proposition,
in my opinion, is destined to do for history
what Darwin's theory has done for biology."
And speaking at the grave-side of his
illustrious colleague — Marx, he said: "Just as
Darwin discovered the law of development in
organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of
development in human society."
Says August Bebel, in "Woman," "Marx,
Darwin, Buckle, have all three, each in his
own way, been of the greatest significance for
modern development and the future form and
growth of human society will, to an extreme
degree, be shaped and guided by their teaching
and discoveries."
And Kautsky in his work on ethics declares
that Darwin's discoveries "belong to the
greatest and most fruitful of the human in-
tellect, and enable us to develop a new critique
of knowledge."
Ernest Untermann, in his latest work "Marx-
ian Economics," well says: "Marx discovered
the specific laws of social development among
human beings. * * * But while doing this, it
never occurred to him to disregard the results
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 41
of Darwin's work. On the contrary, he knew
the art of combining Darwin's results with his
own, without doing violence to either."
This evidence of the general consensus of
opinion among Socialist scholars as to the
value of Darwin's work and its special import-
ance for Socialism could easily be enlarged
indefinitely. But enough has been cited to
show that a comprehensive grasp of the So-
cialist philosophy implies a knowledge of
Darwinian theories.
The greatness of Darwin's work has two
aspects; the immense impetus he gave to the
general theory of evolution, and, his discovery
of its main process, "natural selection." In
the popular mind this distinction is lost in
confusion and a great army of popular but
ill-informed expounders have added to the
muddle. The two things although closely re-
lated — a.^ cause and effect — are yet quite
distinct, and a clearer understanding of Dar-
win's work is made possible by the distinction
being kept in mind. The honor of having dis-
covered "natural selection" Darwin shares
with Wallace only; as a contributor to the
theory of evolution, he is one of a long and
illustrious line. But even here he is the greatest
of them all precisely because of his specific dis-
covery which, by explaining how evolution
42 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
works — at least among living things,
(biology) — has made the general theory im-
pregnable.
Before proceeding to that specific theory let
us clearly understand that evolution has
ceased to be a theory merely, it is also a well
established fact. Anyone who denies this has
no part or lot in the intellectual life of the last
half century. Such a one, as Professor
Giddings recently said, ''inhabits a world of
intellectual shades. He cannot grasp the
earthly interests of the twentieth century."
Every science in the biological hierarchy has
contributed its quota to the establishment of
the theory of evolution, and that theory in
return has, in one department after another,
produced order and system where before
nothing existed but a conglomerate mass of
apparently unrelated facts. So thoroughly
has the theory impregnated every branch of
science that an intelligent dentist must be an
evolutionist.
The chief honors fall to the two sciences
Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Ontogeny deals
with the history of the germ from its be-
ginnning as an egg to its full fruition as a fully
developed individual or as Haeckel defines it,
"the history of the evolution of individual
human organisms." Phylogeny is defined by
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 43
the same authority as, ''the history of the evo-
lution of the descent of man, that is, of the
evolution of the various animal forms through
which, in the course of countless ages, man-
kind has gradually passed to its present form/'
I mention these two sciences together be-
cause it is by comparing them that their chief
signifiance appears. It is one of the most
astonishing discoveries of science and at the
same time one of the most convincing proofs
of evolution, that the whole process of the
development of the human race from the
lowest or simplest forms, which constitutes the
subject-matter of phylogeny, is reproduced in
brief in the development of the embryo of the
individual. This remarkable fact Haeckel
named "the biogenetic principle."
Darwin's chief claim however to a pedestal
in the hall of fame rests on his discovery of
"natural selection."
During his memorable voyage on "The
Beagle" he observed that there was no
essential connection between a species' repro-
ductive powers and the number of its popula-
tion. As this discovery plays an important
part in his theory we will let him speak for
himself. In his "Journal of Researches" he
gives the following case, with his conclusion:
"I was surprised to find, on counting the eggs
44 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
of a large white Doris (a kind of sea slug)
how extraordinarily numerous they were.
From two to five eggs (each three thousandths
of an inch in diameter) were contained in a
spherical little case. These were arranged two
deep in transverse rows forming a ribbon. The
ribbon adhered to the rock in an oval sphere.
One which I found, measured nearly twenty
inches in length and half inch in breadth. By
counting how many balls were contained in
a tenth of an inch in the row, and how many
rows in an equal length of the ribbon, on the
most moderate computation there were six
hundred thousand eggs. Yet this Doris was
certainly not very common: although I was
often searching under the stones I saw only
seven individuals. No fallacy is more common
among naturalists, than that the numbers of
an individual species depend on its powers of
propagation.''
This instance is moderate compared with
multitudes of others. The question then arises
as to why, of such a numerous progeny, only
a sufficient number reach adult stage as will
replace the parent stock so that population
remains practically stationary.
Here Darwin became indebted to Dr.
Malthus who, but for that indebtedness would
have been forgotten ere this. In his "Essay
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 45
on Population" Malthus points out various
'"checks" to the increase of population. His
main theory was that the population tends to
increase more rapidly than the food supply.
The Reverend Doctor, having begotten twelve
children of his own, felt ''called" to point out
to British parents the desirability and even
necessity of limiting their families in the
interest of society. Malthus applied his
theory to human society where it is palpably
false. Darwin transferred it to the natural
world where it proved to be a great truth.
The obvious explanation of this paradox is:
that man, by agriculture and industry, can
increase his food supply to a greater proportion
than any probable or even possible increase of
population. Animals cannot; their food supply
is beyond their control ; they have no power to
artificially increase the supply. This difference
totally destroyed the value of Malthus' book
as a treatise on political economy. His im-
mortality is assured solely because he ac-
cidentally contributed a link to Darwin's
chain.
And now Darwin has travelled on his great
journey thus far: Animals propagate enor-
mously but their population generally does not
increase. The main reason for this, though
there are others, is, that their number is
46 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
limited by the amount of food available.
Therefpre, if two parents produce ten thousand
only two or three individuals will reach
maturity : the rest will perish. The remainder
of the problem, which still remained for Dar-
win to solve, was : first, is there any law which
determines which shall survive and which shall
be destroyed; and second, if there is such a
law, will that law explain and thus, at the
same time, prove, the origin of new species?
It is precisely because Darwin solved both
points of this tremendous problem with a
clear and irrefutable affirmative that he occu-
pies the foremost place in the annals of science.
Professor John Fiske said: "There is one
thing which a man of original scientific or
philosophical genius in a rightly ordered world
should never be called upon to do. He should
never be called upon to earn a living ; for that
is a wretched waste of energy, in which the
highest intellectual power is sure to suflfer
serious detriment, and runs the risk of being
frittered away into hopeless ruin.''
Whether Fiske was right or wrong the only
pertinent point here is that Darwin was
spared that necessity.
To his great task he brought a patience that
is almost without parallel. One of his bio-
graphers, Grant Allen, tells us that : "His uncle
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 41
and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, sug-
gested to him that the apparent sinking of
stones on the surface might really be due to
earthworm castings. So, as soon as he had
some land of his own to experiment upon, he
began in 1842, to spread broken chalk over a
field at Down, in which, twenty-nine years
later in 1871, a trench was dug to test the
results. "What other naturalist," asks Allen,
ever waited so long and so patiently to dis-
cover the upshot of a single experiment? Is
it wonderful that a man who worked like that
should succeed, not by faith but by logical
power, in removing mountains?''
Darwin studied domestic animals. He ob-
served how many, and how widely different,
races there are of horses, dogs, swine, poultry
in general and pigeons in particular. In each
instance the many varieties are derived from
an original common stock, as domestic fowls
from the Indian jungle fowl, and pigeons from
the old-world rock-dove.
''Derived," but how — by what process? In
the case of domestic creatures this was not
difficult to answer. It is accomplished by
breeders "selecting" the individuals to be bred
froir. In the case of pigeons, which Darwin
laid particular stress on the fancier seemed to
48 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
be able to obtain almost any kind of a bird by
selecting as parents those pigeons which had
the desired characteristics developed to the
most pronounced degree, and then again se-
lecting in the same way from their progeny.
In this way were produced birds so different
from each other and their ancestors as the
tumbler, the fantail, the pouter, and about a
hundred and fifty other varieties. The same
with horses. If the breeder desired draught
horses, he selected for parents those
animals with massive shoulders and sturdy
limbs. When a racer wins a "classic" race, it
is at once sent to the stud-farm. Although in
the zenith of its powers it races no more; ,i,t*
is "selected" for another and more important
role — the reproduction and, it is hoped, the
accentuation of the characteristics which
enabled it to outrun its competitors.
All this impressed on Darwin's mind the
importance of the word "selection," which
appears in the title of his theory and the sub-
title of his epoch-making book. Could it be
possible that nature contained some principle
or combination of principles, which performed
among wild animals a part analogous to that
of the breeder, among domestic animals?
Darwin discovered that this is precisely what
takes place.
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 49
His famous theory may be formulated under
the three following heads :
(i) Heredity.
(2) Variation.
(3) The struggle for existence, with its
resultant, survival of the fittest.
Darwin requires very little of heredity, and
what he does ask is beyond dispute. It is
enough for his theory if like begets like and
''figs do not grow on thistles.''
Similarly with variation, the demands of his
hypothesis are very slight. If it be conceded
that variation is a fact, that offspring do vary
from their parents and each other, it is
enough. And who will dispute this in a world
where no two creatures are exactly and in all
particulars alike? The apparent contradiction
that, heredity demands likeness, while varia-
tion requires difference, is confined to the sur-
face — it is not real. The likeness is general
while the difference is particular. A sheep may
be born with shorter or longer legs, by varia-
tion; but it will be a sheep and not a horse,
by heredity.
As an example of the working of the theory
let us take Lamarck's piece de resistance, the
giraffe. Lamarck says: "We know that this
animal, the tallest of mammals, inhabits the
interior of Africa, and that it lives in localities
60 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
where the earth, almost always arid and
destitute of herbage, obliges it to browse on
the foliage of trees and to make continual
efforts to reach it. It has resulted from this
habit, maintained for a long period in all the
individuals of its race, that its forelegs have
become longer than the hinder ones, and that
its neck is so elongated that the giraffe, with-
out standing on its hind legs, raises its head
and reaches six meters in height (almost
twenty feet).
Lamarck thought this length of neck was
acquired by "continual efforts to reach,'' or,
as Alfred Russell Wallace puts it in his critic-
ism of Lamarck — "stretching." Many critics
ventilated their wit on this theory of La-
marck's, under the impression that they were
lampooning Darwin's idea.
They made a blunder similar to that of those
critics of Utopian Socialism who labor under
the pleasing delusion that they are riddling
the theories of Marx. Professor Ritchie has
preseived a couple of stanza's by a witty
Scotch judge who aimed his poem at Darwin,
but hit Lamarck.
"A deer with a neck that was longer by half
Than the rest of his family, try not to laugh,
By stretching and stretching became a giraffe
Which nobody can deny.
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 51
That four-footed beast which we now call a
whale,
Held his hind-legs so close that they grew to
a tail,
Which he uses for threshing the sea, like a
flail,
Which nobody can deny."
But Darwin's theory is altogether inde-
pendent of the ''stretching" idea. The causes
and origin of heredity and variation are up to
this moment, alike wrapped in mystery. But
when science succeeds in penetrating those
secrets, it is extremely unlikely that Darwin's
theory will be seriously weakened, no matter
what the causes may prove to be.
Now about the giraffe. We will suppose,
for the sake of illustration, two giraffes, a
male and a female, whose necks are precisely
five feet long. We will confine our illustration
to the question of the neck alone. We will
suppose this particular pair to give birth to a
family of three. First comes heredity. All we
ask of heredity is that the young shall be
giraffes, not camels or any other species ; and
this heredity guarantees. Now comes varia-
tion. As this is an ideal case for the purpose
of illustrating the theory, we will have one of
the three shorter-necked than the parents,
62 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
another the same length, while the third has a
longer neck — over five feet.
Now comes the struggle for existence. When
this family of giraffes is fairly grown and the
new-comers are approaching breeding age —
mark the importance of this matter of
"breeding age," for the problem is to find out
how nature determines which shall be bred
from — they are obliged to forage for them-
selves. There is no pasture to graze; they
live in what is almost a desert. There are few
shrubs; scarcely anything but fairly high
trees — from ten to twenty feet. If a giraffe
breeder had this matter in hand and he wished
to increase the length of the giraffe's neck, the
problem would be simple. He would select
number three with the longest neck, pair it
with the longest necked member of the op-
posite sex in some other family and the trick
would be done. But this is in Central Africa,
where there is no breeder to interfere, and the
question is: can nature accomplish the same
result without his help?
This is what happens. First the leaves are
eaten from all the lower branches as they are
reached with the least effort. Then they go
higher and still higher until the point is
reached where number one with the shortest
neck cannot reach any further and the terrible
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 53
struggle for existence begins. Number two sees
no danger as yet and number three has things
all his own way. But with short-necked num-
ber one, a tragedy has begun. Every day now
sees the food further out of his reach and even
number two is obliged to reach out for his
supply. The breeding time is approaching but
the longer necked and therefore well-fed and
vigourous females will have nothing to do with
this wobbley starving creature, and the longer
necked, well-fed males shun the short-necked
starving females. If the starving ones mate,
the mother dies before giving birth to off-
spring, or she cannot get nourishment enough
to rear her progeny ; in either case there is no
effective succession. So the longer-necked
are the fittest and they survive. Thus does
nature "select" one by the negative process of
destroying the rest, in about the same way as
a man "selects" one puppy in a litter by
drowning the rest.
In the case of the puppies we may say
"artificial selection ;" in the case of the giraffe
it is "natural selection." And this theory,
simple as it may seem here, revolutionized
Biology.
It is worthy of note that "natural" selec-
tion has many advantages over "artificial"
selection. The breeder may be mistaken;
64 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
he may select the wrong puppy and drown
its superior. The horse that won the
great race may have had a fleeter-footed com-
panion in the same stable had the trainer
known how to develop his possibilites. The
gardener may have passed the best root or
stem through carelessness. But nature makes
no such mistakes, or if she does she eventually
redeems them. Her method, while it is wholly
fortuitous and unintelligent, is practically in-
fallible. The condition of survival is, adapta-
tion to environment. The very process of
selection is, in itself, a sure test of fitness.
True, moral considerations are eliminated — at
least in the non-social world— yet nature offers
something like a fair field and no favors. When
we speak of nature's favorites, we simply mean
those who are best fitted to meet her hard
conditions.
Take a row of celery plants, from which
future seedlings are to be "selected."
In this instance, let us suppose, the quality
desired is ability to resist frost. How is the
gardener to know which of fifty plants are the
"best'' in this respect. He has no method of
finding out with any degree of certainty. But
nature comes along some night with a sharp
frost and "selects" ten by killing forty And
the very act of this "natural" selection proves
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 55
that these ten are better able to withstand the
frost than their fellows.
Breeders of white sheep who supply the
white wool market have a very tangible guide
— they kill every lamb that shows the least
tinge of black. But even here, nature is not
to be out-done. In Virginia there is — or at
least was in Darwin's day — a wild hog of pure
black. One of its staple foods was known as
the "paint-root." Any hog with the least
speck of white on its body was poisoned by
this root while its all-black brothers found it
a health-sustaining and succulent food.
In an environment which remained constant
and where a species of animals had reached a
population which strained the limits of sub-
sistence — food supply — those offspring which
most closely resemble their parents, who had
won out in that environment, would again
succeed and be selected. While if the envir-
onment changed — became warmer or colder
for example^ — those descendants which hap-
pened to vary in a direction making them
better able to cope with the new conditions
would be selected for survival as against those
who resembled their parents, which parents
had survived in their day because they were
adapted to the prior environment.
For exfimple, a country is well supplied with
56 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL. AND ORGANIC
water and it is as a consequence fertile and
"green." In such a country green insects and
green reptiles will be selected, because a green
background will render them almost invisible
to their enemies. Individuals of other colors
will make their appearance by variation, but
they will be such plain targets to their enemies,
they will be devoured before they reach
breeding age and have a chance to reproduCjP
the variation.
But suppose desiccation (drying up) sets
in. The country loses its water supply, as
Krapotkin has shown to have been the case in
North West Mongolia and East Turkestan,
leading to the enforced exodus of the barbar-
ians. Now green will disappear and brown or
yellow — say brown — takes its place. While this
change will not, so far as we know, cause in-
sects and lizards to breed brown instead of
green, it will ensure the survival or "selection"
of such as are born brown and the destruction
of those who breed true to their green ancestors.
Now every atavistic return to green will be
mercilessly weeded out, just as, when the coun-
try was well-watered and green, every sporadic
production of brown was done to death.
This is the biological foundation of that
environment philosoph}^ v:hich noAV pervades
all our thinking. Change the physical environ-
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 57
ment, says the biologist, and the species will
be transformed. Change the economic envir-
onment, says the Socialist, and, if you make
the right change, the race will be redeemed.
Both statements rest on the same fundamental
laws.
As the many and highly important implica-
tions of this theory, are fully dealt with in
subsequent lectures most of them will be
passed here.
We may note however, that whenever any
nation in the modern world, produces, in the
development of its industry, a Socialistic
variation, that new feature at once proves its
utility and is "selected" in the Darwinian
sense, because it constitutes an advantage over
the previous form of social organization, in
that particular. This is the reason why the
trust — which is socialistic and revolutionary
in its essential tendences — is always victorious,
in spite of the foolish ravings of the Hearst
newspapers and the antediluvian twaddle of
William Jennings Bryan.
But Darwin's crowning achievement is that
he made the general theory of evolution im-
pregnable by thoroughly and conclusively
demonstrating it in his own field as a naturalist.
From then on it was only a question of time
as to when its application would be universal.
58 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
Socialism may be defined as the application
of the theory of evolution to the phenomena of
society. This is precisely what Marx and
Engels accomplished, and this why their work
is so fundamentally opposed to the con-
ventional theories and theological superstitious
current in their time, and so fully in harmony
with all the latest achievements in the scientific
world. History ceases to be a meaningless
mass of war and famine, bloodshed and cruelty.
It becomes a panorama presenting the develop-
ment of society according to laws which may
be understood and with a future that may be
measurably predicted.
It develops by the operation of forces that
no man or class can wholly stay or hinder. The
power of those forces and the direction in
which they are now making has been well set
forth by Victor Hugo by a very striking
simile in the following passage:
"We are in Russia. The Neva is frozen.
Heavy carriages roll upon its surface. They
improvise a city. They lay out streets. They
build houses. They buy. They sell. They
laugh. They dance. They permit themselves
anything. They even light fires on this water
become granite. There is winter, there is ice
and they shall last forever. A gleam pale and
wan spreads over the sky and one would say
DARWIN'S NATURAL SELECTION 59
that the sun is dead. But no, thou art riot
dead, oh Liberty ! At an hour when they have
most profoundly forgotten thee; at a moment
when they least expect thee, thou shall arise,
oh, dazzling sight! Thou shalt shoot thy
bright and burning rays, thy heat, thy life, on
all this mass of ice become hideous and dead.
Do you hear that dull thud, that crackling,,
deep and dreadful ? Tis the Neva tearing loose.
You said it was granite. See it splits like glass.
'Tis the breaking of the ice, I tell you. Tis the
water alive, joyous and terrible. Progress re-
commences. 'Tis humanity again beginning its
march. Tis the river which retakes its course,
uproots, mangles, strikes together, crushes
and drowns in its waves not only the empire
of upstart Czar Nicholas, but all of the relics
of ancient and modern despotism. That
trestle work floating away? It is the throne.
That other trestle? It is the scaffold. That
old book, half sunk? It is the old code of
capitalist laws and morals. That old rookery
just sinking? It is a tenement house in which
wage slaves lived. See these all pass by;
passing by never more to return ; and for this
immense engulfing, for this supreme victory of
life over death, what has been the power
necessary? One of thy looks, oh, sun! One
stroke of thy strong arm, oh, labor !"
IV.
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY.
The weak, untrained brain must have a
conclusion. It cannot reserve its decision or
render an open verdict. It is completely at sea
in the scientific world where the most pro-
found savant is often obliged to say, "I don't
know." In a crowded courtroom, ninety per
cent of the spectators have made up their
minds that the prisoner is innocent or guilty
before the first witness is called or a line of
the evidence has been read. He has a square
jaw, or bushy eyebrows, or thick lips, or he
shifts uneasily from one foot to the other, any
or all which proves to the simpletons back of
the rail, that he must be guilty no matter what
the crime is, or what the evidence may be. If
he has blue eyes and fair hair and mustache,
or a pleasant manner, or pretty hands and
the onlookers were to decide the matter, they
would hardly convict him on his own con-
fession. In England, a judge is not placed on
the bench because he "stands in" with a ward
boss, but because of his wide scholarship and
systematic training, and the reason advanced
90
WEISMANN'S THEORY OP HEREDITY 61
for this method is, that only a scientific scholar
can reserve his opinion until all the evidence is
in and then, if the case demands it, render an
open verdict.
With the vexed problem of heredity, which
has been so much to the fore in science for the
last twenty-four years, while many great
thinkers have distinctly taken sides, it must
be remembered that in many points of great
importance, the only possible verdict on the
contentions of either side, is one of "not
proven/'
But although this controversy has split the
evolutionists into two camps, it in no way
compromises the evolution theory itself. The
controversy is based on the admission of all
the parties to it, that evolution is granted,
and the question at issue involves only a differ-
ence as to how the acknowledged results are
accomplished. Evolution is no longer merely
a theory, it is an established fact, and is re-
cognized as such by all who live in an intel-
lectual atmosphere belonging to this side of
1859, the year of the publication of the "Origin
of Species.''
Neither does the result of this discussion
threaten, in any way, the validity of the Dar-
winian theory of "Natural Selection." All the
disputants are avowed Darwinians, and dis-
02 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
agree only as to whether Darwin's theory is
alone sufficient to account for the origin of new
species.
Professor Packard, Lamarck's biographer,
and one of his warmest admirers, at the close
of his chapter devoted to the denial of "pure"
Darwinism says: "We must never forget or
under-estimate, however, the inestimable value
of the services rendered by Darwin, who by
his patience, industry, and rare genius for ob-
servation and experiment, and his powers of
lucid exposition, convinced the world of the
truth of evolution, with the result that it has
transformed the philosophy of our day. We
are all evolutionists, though we may differ as
to the nature of the efficient causes."
There are now three possible positions, (i.)
That of the Lamarckians, pure and simple,
who maintain that Lamarck's theory in itself
explains all the phenomena, and that Darwin's
principle of selection is not only invalid but
superfluous. This school is practically extinct,
though Packard often sails to its very edge in
his efforts to defend his subject, as is the man-
ner of biographers. (2.) The Neo- (New)-
Lamarckians who develop Lamarck's theory
and add to it Darwin's selective principle as of
greater, equal, or secondary importance, ac-
cording as they lean the more strongly to Dar-
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 63
win or Lamarck. This position held the field
almost alone, until Weismann fired his open-
ing gun in 1883. He founded (3) the Neo-
Darwinian school which repudiates altogether
the Lamarckian factor of the hereditary trans-
mission of acquired characters, and maintains
that Darwin's theory is able to dispense with
Lamarckian ideas of use and disuse.
As Weismann is the storm center of the
controversy we will now examine his theory.
In 1883 Weismann became the pro-Rector of
the University of Freiburg and in the hall of
the University, in June of that year, he publicly
delivered his inaugural lecture "On Heredity."
This lecture is generally regarded as the first
broadside in that war which filled with its
reverberations the scientific magazines of the
world for the next thirteen years. As one
writer aptly says, "The warring scientists
splashed like irate cuttle-fishes in clouds of
their own ink." About 1896 however, the public
grew tired of the never-ending flood of biolog-
ical lore on what looked to the lay mind like
an insoluble problem. The editors, with their
fingers on the public pulse, cried, "A plague
on both your houses," and ^ent the savants
to seek in their laboratories the victories de-
nied to their pens.
As a matter of fact however, the coming
64 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
Struggle was foreshadowed in a paper read by
Weismann at the meeting of the Association
of the German Naturalists at Salzburg, two
years earlier, in 1881.
This paper was entitled "The Duration of
Life," and the subject was still further devel-
oped in an academic lecture, in 1883, o^ "Life
and Death." These two biological contribu-
tions not only indicated the foundations of
Weismann's theory, but they threw a very
brilliant light in certain very dark places.
Weismann not only took up, but he solved
the hitherto obscure question of the origin of
death.
Johannes Muller had, as early as 1840, re-
jected the prevailing hypothesis which held
the death of animals to be due to "the influ-
ences of the organic environment, which grad-
ually wear away the life of the individual."
Muller argued that if this were so "the or-
ganic energy of an individual would steadily
decrease from the beginning." Everybody
knows, however, that in spite of the wear and
tear caused by the "environment," be it or-
ganic or inorganic, the volume of life in-
creases, until a certain stage is reached in
all animals. But Muller had failed to fill the
gap his criticism had created.
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 65
This problem Weismann solved by analys-
ing the methods of reproduction among ani-
mals. These generally speaking are two; sex-
ual, and non-sexual or, as it is sometimes
termed, a-sexual. This latter form is the mode
that prevails at the bottom of the organic
scale — among the protozoa, animals con-
sisting of a single cell. This method has a
variety of forms v^hich are classified by Hae-
ckel as (i) self-division; (2) formation of
buds; (3) the formation of germ-cells or
spores. We shall here deal only with the first,
self-division, or fission, which is the most uni-
versal of all methods of propagation, being
the progress by which the individual cells
which compose all the higher animals multi-
ply themselves. This is the method vital to
Weismann's theory and the other two are no
more than distinct modifications of fission.
When a Moneron or an Amoeba reaches a
certain size, it begins to pinch in the middle
like a tightly-laced corset. This increases until
the creature divides into two equal halves.
Each of these halves becomes a complete in-
dividual which continues to thrive until the
next division takes place.
What Weismann observed as the most sign-
ificant thing about this was that in this pro-
cess and among these unicellular (single
6(^ EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
celled) organisms there is no such thing as
natural death. Accidental death is wholesale
in its proportions, but no Moneron ever dies
of old age. Astounding as it may seem to the
layman, the race-old, world-wide idea that
death is "essential to the very nature of life
Itself IS here totally and indisputably over-
thrown.
"I pointed out,'' says Weismann, in the sec-
ond lecture and referring to the first "that we
could not speak of natural death among uni-
cellular animals, for their growth has no term-
ination which is comparable with death. The
origin of new individuals is not connected
with the death of the old; but increase by
division takes place in such a way that the
two parts into which an organism separates
are exactly equivalent to one another, and
neither of them is older or younger than the
other. In this way countless numbers of in-
dividuals arise, each of which is as old as the
species itself, while each possesses the capa-
bility of living on indefinitely, by means of
divisions."
Among the Metazoa, i. e., multicellular or
many celled animals, this immortality of the
individual disappears. "Here, also," says Weis-
mann, "reproduction takes place by means of
cell-division, but every cell does not possess
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 6?
the power of reproducing the whole organism.
The cells of the organism are differentiated
into two essentially different groups, the re-
productive cells — ova or spermatozoa — and
the somatic cells, or cells of the body. The
immortality of the unicellular organism has
passed over to the former — the reproductive
cells — the others must die, and since the
body of the individual is chiefly composed of
them, it must die also."
And so death came into the world, not by
sin, as the Genesis legend reports, but through
sex ; a most astonishing conclusion, it may be,
but one from which there is apparently no
escape. Immortality still remains, it is true,
but it is not the immortality of the conscious
self. Positive science, nothwithstanding all its
glorious gifts, has dealt a terrible blow to those
gorgeous dreams of primitive men and modern
mystics : those hopes and longings which have
sustained millions of our race in hours of
supreme sorrow; a blow which not even the
bravest has been able to receive without flinch-
ing. The only immortality of which science
has any surety is that of these unconscious
single cells, which make possible the repro-
duction of the species.
Weismann, then, divides the cells which
compose the bodies of the higher animals, in-
68 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
eluding man, into two distinct kinds; the
somatic, or body cells and the germ, or re-
productive cells. These germ cells are, so to
speak, batteries in which are stored a sub-
stance which Weismann calls germ-plasm.
A minutely small portion of this germ-plasm
from an individual of one sex, mixed with a
similar portion from an individual of the other
will produce a new individual. But — and
here comes the keystone of Weismann's arch
— only a portion of the mixed germ-plasm is
used up in the composition of the new indi-
vidual; the rest is stored away in the germ-
cells of the new individual for further repro-
duction when the time arrives. The only rela-
tion that this reserved germ-plasm has with
the body cells of the new individual is that it
is provided by them with room and board.
Thus, according to Weismann, from genera-
tion to generation, there is an unbroken stream
of germ-plasm, and this constitutes his cele-
brated theory of "The Continuity of Germ-
Plasm." Granted this theory as a premise,
and Weismann's conclusions cannot be gain-
said. This germ-plasm being the sole "carrier
of heredity," nothing that happens to the so-
matic or body cells can be transmitted to the
progeny.
Darwin had put forward a theory of hered-
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 69
ity which he called "Pangenesis," which made
out a good case for the admission of the Lam-
arckian factor. According to this theory all
the somatic or body cells give forth still
smaller cells which he calls "gemmules.''
These gemmules are collected, by some pro-
cess not explained, in the reproductive organs.
Here they are in packets, and these "packets
of gemmules" are "the carriers of heredity.'*
One can easily see how by this process the
effects of use and disuse would be transmiss-
ible for an organ shrunk by disuse would not
be capably represented by an efficient delega-
tion of gemmules at the reproductive head-
quarters.
Speaking of this theory, Grant Allen in his
biography of Darwin says, "Let not the love
of the biographer deceive us. Not to mince
matters, it was his one conspicuous failure,
and is now pretty universally admitted as
such." It must be remembered however, that
Darwin was fully aware of its purely specu-
lative character and with his usual caution
entitled it the "Provisional Hypothesis of
Pangenesis."
Romanes, one of Weismann's ablest critics,
compares Weismann's theory with Darwin's,
and while he refuses to defend Pangenesis
against Weismann's charge that it is a wholly
70 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
unsupported speculation, he replies by con-
tending that the germ-plasm theory lives in
precisely the same kind of a glass house.
However that may be, it is quite clear that
the germ-plasm theory completely shuts out
the Lamarckian factor of evolution in all cases
where propagation is sexual.
"But," say the Neo-Lamarckians, "Darwin-
ism in itself, merely assumes variations with-
out attempting to explain their origin. Nat-
ural selection only explains the survival of
the fittest; it tells us nothing of what Prof.
Cope calls the 'Origin of the Fittest/ There
must be variation before selection, whence
then, comes this variation?" To this question
Weismann has a ready reply. "Variation is
due to the blending of two wholly different
kinds of germ-plasm at conception, producing
at birth a result that is not, and cannot be,
wholly like? the contributor of either."
And now, at last, the great German is in a
corner. If all variations are due to congenital
characters only, and these, of course, are only
possible because of the combinations secured
by sexual reproduction, how do variations
arise among non-sexual organisms where such
combinations cannot exist?
This is indeed, a poser. But any rejoicing
by Weismann's opponents is quite premature.
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 71
The sagacity which set those opponents by
the ears is still available. There is no attempt
to untie that knot; Weismann cuts it with a
knife. He empties his antagonist's sails by a
smiling and gracious surrender. Below the
sexually reproducing animals, he concedes the
operation of the Lamarckian factor. In that
unicellular world it is not a special cell that
is passed on but the individual itself is con-
tinued, and of course any character acquired
by the individual will be preserved along with
the individual.
Thus then the region of controversy is lim-
ited to sexually reproducing organisms and
we come to the field where the fiercest fight
was made. Do these organisms transmit by
heredity those characters or peculiarities ac-
quired by the individual during its own life-
time? To this question the Neo-Lamarckians
gave a positive affirmative, which Weismann
met with an unwavering denial.
Weismann challenged his opponents to pro-
duce a single demonstration of such a trans-
mission. Here let us be clear as to what is
meant by an acquired character. For illustra-
tion, let us suppose a father leaves his son an
estate of a thousand acres. That is inherit-
ance. If the son leaves his son the same one
thousand acres, that is still inheritance. But
72 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL, AND ORGANIC
if that son increases the estate, during his
life-time to two thousand, the second thou-
sand is an "acquired character" of a property
nature. There the analogy ceases for there is
no dispute as to his ability to transmit both
thousands to his heirs by inheritance.
But with "acquired characters" of a biolog-
ical nature, W^ismann maintains this to be
impossible. Many specific instances were put
forward in refutation of this contention. Her-
bert Spencer cited the case of the supposed
degeneration of the little toe in civilized man
as a result of the shoe wearing habit. This
it was urged could only have occurred through
the transmission of acquired characters and
not by natural selection as this diminished toe
could not be of any value in the struggle for
existence.
But it was shown by measuring the feet of
savages, who do not wear shoes, and whose
ancestors never wore them, that the small
toes of savages had degenerated quite as
much.
Then Cesare Lombroso entered the arena
leading a camel. According to the Italian
criminologist, the camel's hump had been first
acquired by bearing loads and then transmit-
ted by heredity. From the fact that the camel
and the llama, which is smooth backed, have
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 73
something in common, he concludes that
camels are really llamas that have recently
acquired a hump in the performance of their
labors. Lombroso also supported his hump
theory by some statements about Hottentot
women having developed callouses on their
hips by carrying their children on their backs.
Unfortunately all Lombroso's ingenuity was
wasted for we happen to possess the geolog-
ical record of the camel in good condition, and
from this history we know that the "ship of
the desert" had his hump before the human
race appeared when according to Lombroso
he should have been a smooth-backed llama.
Disappointed as Weismann's critics were it
was hardly feasible to argue that the camel
had gotten his hump in those early times by
placing loads on his own back.
It was clearly seen that if a case of the
transmission of a mutilation could be estab-
lished, Weismann's theory would be thereby
demolished. A remarkable attempt was made
in this direction in 1887 at the meeting of the
Association of the German Naturalists at
Wiesbaden. To that dignified gathering came
Dr. Zacharias with a number of tailless cats.
It was asserted that these cats had no tails
because their mother had lost her tail through
having it run over by a cart wheel. The ex-
74 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
amination of these specimens proved an enter-
taining diversion from the regular proceed-
ings, and Prof. Eimer took them seriously
enough to refer to them in a later work as "a
valuable instance of the transmission of mu-
tilations."
Weismann, however, refused to be put
down. He insisted that in the absence of ab-
solute certainty as to the cart wheel incident,
they did not fulfill the first condition of scien-
tific evidence, and Dr. Zacharias wisely ad-
mitted later, that this point was well taken.
Prof. Poulton had described certain cats with
extra toes which he had kept under surveil-
lance for seven generations. "It would be
equally justifiable," says Weismann. "to de-
rive cats with extra toes from an ancestor
whose toes had been trodden on, as to derive
the tailless cats of the Isle of Man from an
ancestor of which the tail had been cut off
by a cart passing over it, and thus to regard
the existence of the race as a proof of the
transmission of mutilations."
Again Weismann points out that the ab-
sence of a tail may not be owing to the muti-
lation of the mother but to the inherent tail-
lessness of an unknown father. He proceeds
to relate how during the year that Dr. Zacha-
rias came with his collection, "My friend. Prof.
WEISMANN'S THEORY OP HEREDITY 75
Schottlius brought me a kitten with an in-
nate rudimentary tail, which he had accident-
ally discovered as one of a family of kittens
at Waldkirch, a small town in the southern
part of the Black Forest. A closer investiga-
tion resulted in the following rather unex-
pected discovery. For some time past, tailless
kittens have frequently appeared in the fam-
ilies of many different mother cats at Wald-
kirch, and this fact is explained in the follow-
ing manner. A clergyman, who lived for some
time at Waldkirch had married an English
lady who possessed a tailless male Manx cat.
The probability that all the tailless cats in
Waldkirch are m.ore or less distant descend-
ants of that male cat amounts almost to cer-
tainty. Since a male Manx cat has reached the
Black Forest, it might equally well arrive at
some other place."
This very same year a popular scientific
journal came to the rescue of the transmission
theory with the following incident purporting
to have taken place 22 years before, in 1864.
"A pregnant merino sheep broke its right fore-
leg about two inches above the knee-joint; the
limb was put in splints and healed a long
time before the following March, when the
annimal produced young. The lamb possessed
a ring of black wool from two to three inches
76 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
in breadth round the place at which the moth-
er's leg had been broken, and upon the same
leg." When this incident was related to Weis-
mann, he replied, "It is a pity that the black
wool was not arranged in the form of the in-
scription *to the memory of the fractured leg
of my dear mother/ "
Writing in the following year Weismann
says, "Furthermore, the mutilations of certain
parts of the human body, as practised by dif-
ferent nations from time immemorial, have
not in a single instance, led to the malforma-
tion or reduction of the parts in question.
Such hereditary effects have been produced
neither by circumcision ngr the removal of
the front teeth, nor the boring of holes in the
lips or nose, nor the extraordinary artificial
crushing and crippling of the feet of Chinese
women. No child among any of the nations
referred to possesses the slightest trace of
these mutilations when born ; they have to be
acquired anew in each generation.''
While it is undoubtedly true that much in
Weismann's position lacks experimental de-
monstration, it is equally true that when the
heat of the discussion somewhat subsided, his
theories were well to the fore, and they have
since secured a wide acceptance among com-
petent authorities. It is hardly to be expected
WEisMAisrN'g THEo:air op heredh'y ^^'^
that his two greatest critics, Spencer and
Haeckel, would look with much favor on a
theory the acceptance of which would make
necessary the re-writing of those many vo-
lumes which constitute their lifework. Lan-
kester, himself no mean authority, in trans-
lating Haeckel's "History of Creation," feels
constrained to say in the preface, "I feel it
due to myself to state that I do not agree
with him as to a very large part of his views
on classification, and as to his belief in the
necessity of assuming the 'transmissibility of
acquired characters/ Readers who have gained
an interest in these questions from the brief
statements of the present work must, with-
out assuming that Professor Haeckers judg-
ment is final, go on to study for themselves
the works of Weismann and others which are
mentioned with perfect fairness in these
pages."
And Joseph McCabe, the translator of his
"Riddle of the Universe," and "Last Words
on Evolution," has this to say in his intro-
duction to the latter, written two years ago,
'To closer students, who are at times impa-
tient of the Lamarckian phraseology of Haec-
kel — to all, in fact, who would like to see
how the same evolutionary truths are ex-
pressed without reliance on the inheritance
78 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
of acquired characters, — I may take the op-
portunity to say that I have translated for the
same publishers, Professor Guenther's "Dar-
winism and the Problems of Life," which will
shortly be in their hands."
It must be admitted that the older view is
much less favorable to the Socialist position
in sociology than the later theory of Weis-
mann. It is a matter of some satisfaction
that so great a critic as Romanes concedes the
feasibility of Weismann's theory while reject-
ing some of the conclusions which he draws
from it. "If Weismann's theory is true," says
Prof. David Starr-Jordan, "the whole litera-
ture of sociology will have to be rewritten!"
And another writer insisted that Weismann
had reopened the case for Socialism.
If it were true that the terrible results of
the degrading conditions forced upon the
dwellers in the slums were transmitted to their
children by heredity, until in a few genera-
tions they became fixed characters, the hopes
of Socialists for a regenerated society would
be much more difficult to realize. In that case
these unfortunate creatures would continue to
act in the same discouraging way for several
generations, no matter how their environment
had been transformed by the corporate action
of society. This much at any rate, Weismann
WEISMANN'S THEORY OF HEREDITY 79
has done for us, he has scientifically destroyed
that lie.
In this respect, independent sociological ex-
periments and investigations have arrived at
the same conclusions as Weismann. Prof.
John R. Commons by careful study, reached
the following conclusions: That 1.75 per cent
of the population of the United States are
congenital defectives; that 3.25 per cent are
induced defectives, that is, they have not in-
herited their deficiency; that 2 per cent are
possessed of genius and will make their way
under the hardest conditions; that 2 per cent
are below the Aryan brain level ; and that the
remaining 91 per cent are normal persons who
are neither good nor bad, brilliant nor stupid,
criminal nor virtuous, and whose future is en-
tirely decided by the environment which sur-
rounds them during the first fifteen years of
their life.
Herman Whittaker, a magazine contributor,
states that during eight years in Canada 2,000
boys taken from the London slums by Dr.
Barnado passed under his observation on a
farm colony. And although most of them had
served terms in jail, not more than one per
cent reverted to their own former habits, or
the habits of their parents.
When it is charged that a transformed so-
80 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
cial environment will not solve the problem
presented by the slum, the sweatshop and the
jail, as Socialists assert, we are justified in
nailing the statement as false, and a libel on
human nature. And in so doing, we are not
sentimental dreamers of dreams, crying for
the moon, but rigid analysts and investigat-
ors, and, as Lassalle once proudly said, "We
have behind us the science and the learning
of our day,"
V.
DE VRIES^ "MUTATION."
Orthodoxy received the most stunning blow
ever given it, at the hands af Charles Darwin,
and it is ever on the lookout for an opportun-
ity to make reprisals. It is only necessary for
some fledgling to challenge Darwin's theory
of the origin of coral reefs and offer some
grotesque assumption in its place, and it is at
once announced from a thousand pulpits that
Darwinism, — that enemy of God and man —
is dead.
Hugo DeVries, however, could hardly be
called a fledgling, and the supporters of Dar-
win had real cause for apprehension, it would
seem, when the rumor gained ground that no
less a person than the Amsterdam professor
had overthrown Darwin's theory, and substi-
tuted one of his own.
Alas, this latest "death of Darwinism" was
no more fatal than its numerous predecessors,
as the following quotation from DeVries him-
self will show:
"My work claims to be in full accord with
the principles laid down by Darwin." And
81
82 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
again, "To Darwin was reserved the task of
bringing the theory of common descent to its
present high rank in scientific and social phi-
losophy." And, "Notwithstanding all these
apparently unsurmountable difficulties, (ab-
sence of experimental evidence since gather-
ed) Darwin discovered the great principle
which rules the evolution of organisms. It is
the principle of natural selection. It is the
sifting out of all organisms of minor worth
through the struggle for life."
The greater part of the adverse criticism,
aimed at Darwinism applies only to the ex-
travagant claims put forward by his over-
enthusiastic disciples; claims not to be found
in the works of Darwin himself. As we shall
see later, one of the greatest oflfenders in this
respect was no less a person than the co-dis-
coverer of the selection theory — Alfred Rus-
sell Wallace."
Of all the mischievous misconceptions of
Darwin's theory none have worked so much
harm as that which regards natural selection
as the active and efficient cause of evolution.
Although, evolution is an established fact, our
knowledge of its processes are incomplete and
must always remain so until we have solved
that most vexed of all biological problems, the
"causes of variation."
DE VniES' "MUTATION" g3
As to the nature of these causes, natural
selection is dumb. For its purpose, variation
IS simply assumed to be a fact, and Darwin's
acknowledged ignorance as to how variation
is brought about is expressed in the term
"spontaneous variation." Until variation has
played its part by producing new and various
forms, selection has no function or office to
perform. Then it simply decides which forms
shall survive by destroying the rest. As Wi-
gand has pointed out, selection does not do
more than determine the survival of what is
offered to it, and does not create anything
new. As DeVries very strikingly puts it, *'It
is only a sieve, and not a force of nature, no
direct cause of improvement, as many of Dar-
win's adversaries, and unfortunately many of
his followers also, have so often asserted. It
is only a sieve which decides which is to live
and which is to die ... . With the single steps
of evolution it has nothing to do. Only after
the step has been taken, the sieve acts, elimi-
nating the unfit.'' Thus Prof. Cope's point
that Darwin's theory does not explain the
"origin" of the fittest, is well taken, or as Mr.
Arthur Harris puts it, "Natural selection may
explain the survival of the fittest, but it can-
not explain the arrival of the fittest."
It was around this question of the "causes"
84 EVOLUTION. SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
of variation that the Neo-Lamarckians and
the Weismannians fought their battle, the for-
mer insisting, as we have seen, that variation
was caused by the hereditary transmission of
acquired characters, while Weismann main-
tained that variation arose solely through the
combining of two portions of differing germ-
plasm contributed by two different individu-
als, and producing a new individual unlike
either, — a "variation" from both. While what-
ever there was of victory fell to Weismann,
neither side has experimentally proven its
case, and we are still in the dark as to the
"causes of variation." Our ignorance is still
cloaked in the convenient word "spontane-
ous ;" to Darwin's "spontaneous variation" we
now add DeVries' "spontaneous mutation."
It is another tribute to Darwin's caution
and insight that he recognized the possibility
of variations arising either suddenly, as De
Vries asserts they do, or gradually as DeVries
denies.
Not only did Alfred Russell Wallace seek
to limit the operation of natural selection in
certain fields, in order to make room for his
spiritualist theories — an adventure which
failed dismally — but he denied the sudden
appearance of new species or sub-species,
thereby restricting Darwinism, as he under-
DE VBIES' "MUTATION" 86
Stood it, to the origin of new species by the
gradual accumulation of those almost imper-
ceptible variations usually described as "fluc-
tuations/' Whatever conflict there may be
between Darwinism and mutation must be
ascribed to Wallace. As DeVries clearly rec-
ognizes, Darwin is in no way responsible.
"Darwin," says DeVries, "recognized both
lines of evolution."
The diflference between "fluctuations" and
"mutation'^ is illustrated by DeVries recalling
Galton's simile of a polyhedron — an example
of which is a solid piece of glass covered with
many small flat faces. When it comes to rest
on any particular face, it is in stable equili-
brium. Small disturbances may make it oscil-
late, but it returns always to the same face.
These oscillations are like fluctuating varia-
tions. A greater disturbance may cause the
polyhedron to roll over on to a new face,
where it comes to rest again, only showing
the ever present fluctuations around the new
center. The new position corresponds to a
mutation. One of the disabilities of this illus-
tration is that some fluctuations represent a
greater disturbance from the given position
than some mutations. The essential difference
is that in the fluctuation it rocks back again
86 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
while in the mutation it remains on a new
base.
Everybody has heard something of the fa-
mous evening primrose which gave DeVries
his first and most conclusive evidence of mu-
tation. At Hilversum near Amsterdam, he
discovered a large number af the plants of the
evening primrose, named Lamarckiana after
Lamarck. It is an American plant imported
to Europe. It often escapes from cultivation
and in this case DeVries says it had escaped
from a park. It had run wild ten years. A
year after first noticing them DeVries ob-
served two new forms which he at once rec-
ognized as two new elementary species.
In the test conditions of his own garden, in
an experiment covering thirteen years, he
observed over fifty thousand of the Lamarcki-
ana spread over eight generations and of these
eight hundred were mutations divided among
seven new elementary species. These muta-
tions, when self-fertilized, or fertilized from
plants like themselves, bred true to them-
selves, thus answering the test of a real spe-
cies. DeVries also watched the field from
which his original forms were taken, and saw
that similar mutations occurred there so that
they were not in any way due to cultivation.
Thus has the modest mutating primrose
DE VRIES' "MUTATION" 87
contributed its quota to the solution of that
riddle of the universe which^ until it is solved,
will always command a paramount position in
the thoughts of men.
DeVries discourages the notion that muta-
tions are always occurring everywhere, which
might seem to be one of the inferences from
his theory, and his twenty-fourth lecture of
the series, delivered before the University of
California is entitled "The Hypothesis of Pe-
riodic Mutations." The common primrose, he
says, seems to be Immutable at present, and
argues that it must have had a mutatory pe-
riod sometime in the past, when, perhaps, the
evening primrose was not mutating. He says :
"All the facts point to the conclusion that
these periods, of stability and mutability, al-
ternate more or less regularly with one an-
other."
He deals the Neo-Lamarckians a heavy
blow by his denial of "direct" adaptation, and
he greatly strengthens their opponents when
he asserts that mutation takes place, not only
in useful directions, but in all directions, leav-
ing natural selection to destroy the unfit. This
is a restatement of Darwin's conception, fol-
lowed by Weismann, of "fortuitous" varia-
tions, and is contrary to the notion of Spencer
and Haeckel, that variations are mainly in the
88 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND OITGANIC
direction of adaptation to environment, as a
result of animals exerting themselves in that
direction.
This point is well stated by DeVries in the
following passage, — "This failure of a large
part of the productions of nature deserves to
be considered at some length. It may be el-
evated to a principle, and may be made use
of to explain many difficult points of the the-
ory of descent. If in order to secure one good
novelty nature must produce ten or twenty or
perhaps more bad ones at the same time, the
possibility of improvements coming by pure
chance must be granted at once. All hypo-
theses concerning the direct causes of adap-
tation at once become superfluous, and the
great principle enunciated by Darwin once
more reigns supreme."
Another difficulty which DeVries claims to
have solved by his theory, is the supposed
contradiction between the physicist and the
biologist as to the time allowed by the former
and the time required by the latter, for the
evolution of animals.
Lord Kelvin asserted the age of the earth to
be between twenty and forty million years.
George Darwin estimates the separation of
the moon from the earth as having taken place
some fifty-six million years ago. Gekie estim-
DE VRIES' "MUTATION" 89
ated the existence of the solid crust of the
earth as at most hundred million years.
Joly, by calculating the amount of dissolved
salts, and Dubois by the amount of lime, es-
timated the age of the rivers, Joly giving as
probable fifty-five and Dubois thirty-six mil-
lions of years.
"All in all,'' concludes DeVries, "it seems
evident that the duration of life does not com-
ply with the demands of the conception of
very slow and continuous evolution." Muta-
tion, with its sudden leaps, has no such dif-
ficulty, and, — "The demands of the biologists
and the results of the physicists are harmon-
ized on the ground of the theory of mutation."
In order properly to estimate the sociolog-
ical significance of DeVries' theory it will be
necessary to go back more than a century, and
observe the sociological import of the leading
biological ideas of that period.
And here let us remark, that nobody knows
better than we do the danger of transplanting,
without criticism, biological theories into the
field of sociology. Nevertheless, our oppo-
nents have never lost an opportunity to twist
and distort science, if perchance by any pos-
sibility it could be made to contradict any-
thing that had so much as the semblance of
Socialism. We, however, have always insisted
90 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
on the weakness of reasoning by mere ana-
logy and have kept to those general laws
which have been worked out separately in so-
ciology.
The principle now about to be applied be-
longs to this latter class. It is the most lumin-
ous principle ever employed in the interpreta-
tion of the phenomena of society. This prin-
ciple is that the intellectual life of a people is
determined by its mode of wealth production
and the social classes arising therefrom.
Jean Lamarck, the first great modern apos-
tle of evolution, died in poverty because he ad-
vocated a theory that appeared to contradict
the interests of the ruling class of his time.
He had against him all that survived of feudal
interests, which was intensely theological, and
although his theory really favored the bourge-
oisie, that class was not yet aware of it.
Cuvier was the lion of that day, for he man-
aged the remarkable feat of adapting science
to the ideas, not only of the increasing bour-
geoisie, but also of the diminishing feudal
power. He pleased the feudal regime, such of
it as remained, by denying evolution, and en-
dorsing its theology. This made his theories
welcome also among those shrewd early capi-
talists, as the English, who realized more
quickly than their fellows, that religious belief
DE VRIES' "MUTATION" 91
might constitute as great a prop for one ruling
class at it had already been for another.
But in his capacity of scientific reflection of
the class interest of his masters, Cuvier's mas-
terpiece was his "cataclysmic theory." Ac-
cording to this theory, organisms were not
the result of evolution, but they were now just
as when they issued from the hands of the
Creator. The difference between existing
forms, and those creatures whose story is
preserved in the rocks, was explained by a
series of cataclysms or catastrophes by which,
at certain widely separated periods, all living
forms were destroyed, and a completely new
stock was created to take their places.
It would be impossible to conceive a better
scientific justification of the French revolu-
tion than Cuvier's theory presented. For many
decades before that event these rising com-
.mercialists had groaned under the yoke of
feudal dues and feudal restraints of trade.
Nothing could be more to their wishes than
a sudden social "cataclysm" that would de-
stroy the feudal system with its trade despis-
ing and plundering nobility, and exalt its own
trading class to fill the vacancy. And when
this had been accomplished, and that same
nobility had been sent to the guillotine, it
was great consolation to have on Cuvier's au-
92 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
thority, that this method of sudden violence
had no less a precedent than the methods of
the Almighty in suddenly destroying the liv-
ing things in his own universe.
Cuvier's theory however, almost died with
him, for the violent desires of the bourgeoisie
were short lived. When it realized the com-
pleteness of its own victory, and that the next
"cataclysm" would mean its own overthrow
and the enthronement of some successor, ca-
taclysms lost favor and were frowned down.
Preachers of sudden and violent changes were
now regarded as the enemies of society, and
Cuvier's once lauded theory of cataclysms was
sneered at as a relic of the dark ages. What
the capitalist class wanted now was peace, and
long lifcj and above all, no disturbances.
And it was just at this point that Darwin
came forward with a theory that seemed made
to order. True this theory spoke of evolution
and change, but the change was so slow it
was impossible to notice it. A million years
was as ten minutes to this theory, and if it
took as long for one class in society to dis-
place another, or for one social regime to suc-
ceed another, as it does for one species to de-
velop from another, the capitalists and their
heirs had nothing to apprehend for a thousand
generations.
DE VRIES* "MUTATION" 93
There was nothing sudden about this the-
ory, quite the contrary. In fact the real diffi-
culty was to see how anything managed to
change at all.
As for that part of it which spoke of the
survival of the fittest, what could be clearer
than that these self-made men were them-
selves the fittest. It was, of course equally
clear that the degraded working class, lacking
the cleverness to rise, was destined to be eli-
minated as unfit, by the laws of nature.
For half a century this argument of slow
evolution has done valiant service as an anti-
dote for Socialism, and the present ruling class
would like to retain it forever.
But no ruling class ever was or ever can
be wholly omnipotent. The capitalists of to-
day can no more hinder the process of social
evolution, with its resulting march of ideas,
than they can intercept gravitation or divert
the tides. They are being driven blindly to
their fate by social forces which are beyond
their command.
They are in the midst of social powers
which mock their puny efforts to administer.
Contradictions arise which cannot continue.
As soon as a capitalist country is over-stocked
with wealth, poverty prepares to stalk abroad.
But amid all this confusion, something
94 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL, AND ORGANIC
moves on, a something which we sometimes
call the spirit of the age. Society grows rest-
less and instinctively anticipates a coming
change. A new class rises into prominence
and begins to realize its strength and develop
its intelligence.
The ruling class still proclaims its will, but
cannot always execute it. Colorado, Idaho,
and Haywood are proof of that. The mental
development of this new class has reached the
point where it has become an intellectual fac-
tor in the national life. Its voice is listened to
by publishers of books. It establishes its own
press. It publishes a literature of its own. It
creates its own platform. It reaches into the
future and demands control of its own destiny.
And now see how all this is reflected in the
scientific world. It is no longer true that spe-
cies require thousands of years for the sim-
plest change. We are now informed that
change; takes place by sudden leaps. At one
single step a new species appears and begins
its existence. There is therefore, no longer
anything in biological science to contradict
the Socialist position that a new society may
be born of a sudden revolution.
Mutation, the savants tell us, runs in peri-
ods, alternating with periods of apparent sta-
bility. Then if we are not supported we are
DE VRIES' "MUTATION" 95
at any rate not contradicted^ when we assert
that in social development, periods of econo-
mic evolution, with apparent social stability,
are followed by periods of social revolution
when the entire social superstructure is trans-
formed.
It is no longer necessary to assume count-
less millions of years for the evolution of liv-
ing forms. A plant enjoys a period of appar-
ent stability, then it reaches a point where it
"explodes" and gives birth to new species. If
a plant, why not a society? At least there is
nothing in the example of the plant that will
furnish an argument against such an idea.
If the history of biological science for the
last half a century were to be written by a
Socialist, who had no scruples about wresting
the record so as to support his Socialist the-
ories, he would have nothing to gain by chang-
ing a single line.
There is nothing in that history to contra-
dict us when we assert the probability or the
certainty, of a social revolution. Who, that
looks about him^ can fail to see that death is
plainly branded in the brow of the existing
social order? Its legal, political, and financial
institutions are tied' together with rotten
thread. It is already outliving its usefulness,
and when it goes it will have few mourners.
96 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
But millions will hail with joy that social mu-
tation which will kindle the fires of human
liberty, and create, if not a new Heaven, at
least, a new earth.
VI.
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID^
Lamarck was the first to present the theory
of Evolution in a thoroughly scientific man-
ner. Then Darwin discovered "the great prin-
ciple which rules the evolution of organisms" ;
the principle of "natural selection." Then
Weismann repudiated current ideas as to how
the fittest "arrived," or "originated," and pre-
sented in their place a theory of his own,
which is still under discussion. DeVries
raised the question as to whether new spe-
cies "arrive" by a gradual accumulation of
tiny changes, or by sudden leaps — muta-
tions — and demonstrated the latter by his
experiments with the evening primrose.
And now comes Kropotkin with the ques-
tion, "Who are the fittest?" What constitutes
the fitness, which makes for survival? Are
those organisms the fittest which are con-
stantly waging a war of extermination against
every other organism in the struggle for ex-
istence, or, are those the fittest which co-
operate with each other in the preservation of
the common life of all?
97
98 EVOLUTION. SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
The raising of this question brings to light
another striking instance of the influence of
class interests on scientific thought. It is a
matter of common observation that any class,
struggling for what it conceives to be its own
emancipation, looks to the past for justifica-
tion and precedent. In the English speaking
world there is a widely prevailing opinion that
the Magna Charta, extorted from King John
at Runnymede, is the foundation of modern
liberty.
The French bourgeoisie, struggling to over-
throw the feudal monarchy, sought its justi-
fication in that "state of nature" which a de-
spotic monarchy was said to contravene.
Thus writers like Rousseau idealized nature,
representing it as comparatively perfect, and
declared that a restoration of "natural rights"
was essential to liberty. But when this same
bourgeoisie had won its victory and enthroned
itself, and instead of increasing the liberty,
had in many respects, deepened the degrada-
tion of the mass of the French people, its
ideas about the "state of nature" underwent a
radical change. And this happened not only
in France but wherever the bourgeoisie tri-
umphed.
Now the "state of nature" was one of con-
stant carnage; nature was "red in tooth and
ICROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AIt>'* 99
claw." And this chamber of horrors was sup-
posed to support the exploitation of labor, and
countenance a brutalization of childhood that
constitutes the blackest stain on human his-
tory. So strong was the swirl that Huxley
was swept into it; but, although he main-
tained the "gladiatorial" view of nature, he
repudiated the social atrocities which capital-
ist apologists such as Spencer sought to de-
duce from it. In later years, Spencer partially
abandoned his premise as to the animal world
but, strangely enough, kept it intact for prim-
itive man.
For this view of nature as full of nothing
but darkness and cruelty, v/here, as Hobbes
had put it, there waged "the war of every one
against everybody," the great authority of
Darwin was invoked. In fact, Darwin was
supposed to be almost solely responsible for
the theory, and its overthrow by Kropotkin
was heralded by the uninformed as another of
those "death-blows" of which Darwinism is
thought to have received so many during the
last quarter of a century.
Kropotkin, however, in his introduction,
claims that the idea of mutual aid is "in real-
ity, nothing but a further development of the
ideas expressed by Darwin in the 'Descent of
Man' ". Darwin said : "Those communities
100 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
which included the greatest number of sym-
pathetic members would flourish best, and
rear the greatest number of oflfspring." Kro-
potkin complains that Darwin did not suffi-
ciently develop this idea, but over-emphasized
the idea of "competition'' for life, and this
error, he insists, was further accentuated by
his disciples. "It happened with Darwin's
theory," he says, "as it always happens with
theories having any bearing upon human re-
lations. Instead of widening it according to
his own hints, his followers narrowed it still
more."
It is a mistake to suppose that Kropotkin
denies the Darwinian principle of mutual
struggle. "It is evident," says he, "that no
review of evolution can be complete unless
these two dominant currents are analyzed * * *
The struggles between these two forces make,
in fact, the substance of history." He antici-
pates the objection that his work only em-
phasizes the principle of mutual aid by insist-
ing that the principle of struggle has "already
been analyzed, described, and glorified from
time immemorial. In fact, up to the present
time, this current alone has received attention
from thef epical poet, the annalist, the histor-
ian, and the sociologist."
The main body of his book is a solid mass
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID'* 101
of evidence of the existence of mutual aid
everywhere in the living world, from the lowest
insects to the highest mammals; and from
the first stone age to the twentieth century.
It consists of eight chapters, the first two of
which are devoted to "Mutual Aid among
Animals."
Here, the theory of the human origin of so-
ciety is utterly demolished. Complex social
arrangements, popularly supposed to be lim-
ited to ants and bees, are shown to flourish
everywhere, especially among birds.
With the parrot mutual aid is developed to
such an extent that Kropotkin places it "at
the very top of the whole feathered world for
the development of its intelligence." The
white cockatoos of Australia, in raiding a
crop, mutually aid each other so shrewdly as
to "baffle all stratagems" to thwart them. "Be-
fore starting to plunder a cornfield, they first
send out a reconnoitering party which occu-
pies the highest trees in the vicinity of the
field, while other scouts perch upon the inter-
mediate trees between the field and the forest
and transmit signals. If the report runs 'all
right,' a score of cockatoos will separate from
the bulk of the band, take a flight in the air,
and then fly towards the trees nearest to the
field. They also will scrutinize the neighbor-
102 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
hood for a long while, and only then will give
the signal for general advance, after which the
whole band starts at once and plunders the
field in no time."
Mutual aid is very conspicuous among peli-
cans. "They always go fishing in numerous
bands and after having chosen an appropriate
bay, they form a wide half circle in face of
the shore, and narrow it by paddling towards
the shore, catching all the fish that happen to
be enclosed in the circle. On narrow rivers
and canals they even divide into two parties,
each of which draws up on a half circle, and
both paddle to meet each other, just as if two
parties of men dragging two long nets should
advance to capture all the fish taken between
the nets when both parties come to meet."
Our familiar friend, the house sparrow, is
not overlooked and is said to have practiced
mutual aid to such an extent as to be recog-
nized even by the ancient Greeks. Kropotkin
quotes from memory, the Greek Orator who
exclaimed: "While I am speaking to you a
sparrow has come to tell other sparrows that
a slave has dropped on the floor a sack of
corn, and they all go there to feed on the
grain." Sparrows also maintain social disci-
pline: "If a lazy sparrow intends appropriat-
ing the nest a comrade is building, or even
KROPOTKIN'S "MtfTUAL. AID" 103
Steals from it a few sprays of straw, the group
interferes against the lazy comrade." Kropot-
kin presents a number of well authenticated
observations of the great compassion and sym-
pathy prevailing among those wild creatures,
which are popularly supposed to be always
flying at each others' throats: J. C. Woods'
narrative "of a weasel which came to pick up
and carry away an injured comrade;'' Brehm,
who "himself saw two crows feeding in a hol-
low tree a third crow which had a wound
several weeks old." Captain Stansbury, on his
journey to Utah, as quoted by Darwin, "saw
a blind pelican which was fed, and well fed,
by other pelicans upon fishes which had to
be brought a distance of thirty miles."
From these and a multitude of similar cases
Kropotkin concludes that while "no naturalist
will doubt that the idea of a struggle for life,
carried on through organic nature, is the
greatest generalization of our century, that
struggle is very often collective, against ad-
verse circumstances."
Kropotkin in concluding his consideration
of animals, immensely strengthens his posi-
tion by pointing out various methods by
which new species may develop or old ones
disappear, without the operation of a deadly
competition between individuals. "The squir-
104 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
rels, for instance, when there is a scarcity of
cones in the larch forests, remove to the fir-
tree forests, and this change of food has cer-
tain well known physiological ef5fects on squir-
rels. If this change of habits does not last —
if next year the cones are again plentiful in
the dark larch wood — no new variety of
squirrels will evidently arise from this cause.
But if part of the wide area occupied by the
squirrels begins to have its physical charac-
ters altered — in consequence of, let us say,
a milder climate or desiccation, (drying up)
which both bring about an increase of the pine
forests in proportion to the larch woods —
and if some other conditions occur to induce
squirrels to dwell on the outskirts of the de-
siccating region — we shall then have a new,
1. e., an incipient new species of squirrels. A
larger proportion of squirrels of the new, bet-
ter-adapted variety would survive each year,
and the intermediate links would die in the
course of time, without having been starved
out by Malthusian competitors."
Again: "If we take the horses and cattle
which are grazing all the winter through in
the Steppes of Transbaikalia, we find them
very lean and exhausted at the end of the
winter. But they grow exhausted not because
there is not enough food for all of them —
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID" 105
the grass buried under a thin sheet of snow is
everywhere in abundance — but because of
the difficulty of getting it from beneath the
snow and this difficulty is the same for all
horses alike. * * * We can safely say that
their number are not kept down by competi-
tion; that at no time of the year they need
struggle, for food and that if they never reach
anything, approaching over-population, the
cause is in the climate, and not in competi-
tion."
After citing the rodents that combine to
store food for the winter, or fall asleep about
the time competition should set in; and the
buffaloes which form immense herds to mig-
rate across a continent to where food is plen-
tiful; and beavers, which when they grow
numerous, divide into two parties, and go, the
old ones down the river, and the young ones
up the river and avoid competition; after cit-
ing these and many others, he declares the
mandate of nature to be: "Don't compete! —
competition is always injurious to the species,
and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!
* * * Therefore combine — practice mutual
aid! That is the surest means for giving to
each and to all the greatest safety, the best
guarantee of existence and progress, bodily,
intellectually, and morally."
106 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
The third chapter deals with ''Mutual Aid
Among Savages." Here we meet the question
as to whether the family is an ancient insti-
tution, antedating the tribe and clan or
whether it appeared at a much later date as
an outgrowth of the clan. Kropotkin takes
the latter view as advocated by Morgan, Ba-
chofen, Maine, Lubbock and Tylor, and re-
jects the former as presented by Starcke and
Westermarck.
The savage of anthropological research is
shown to be a very different creature from the
blood-thirsty monster of popular tradition.
"Sometimes he is a cannibal, it is true, but not
often, and then it is closely associated with
economic necessity, and is abandoned when
food becomes plentiful." The custom of leav-
ing old men in the woods to die, is bad
enough, but not so bad as supposed. They
usually carry the old man with them in their
migrations until he himself grows tired of be-
ing a burden and begs to be killed. When
this point is reached, he is given more than
his share of food, and left in the woods to
die, because no one has the heart to kill him.
Infanticide is practiced from the same motive
which induces savages to take all kinds of
measures for diminishing the birth-rate — they
cannot rear all of their children. In times
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID'* 107
of plenty it disappears. It was when these
customs were enveloped in a religious halo
and preserved as sacred ceremonies, after all
necessity for them had disappeared, that they
attained their most revolting characters.
He believed in revenge but it was to be
strictly measured by the offense. It must be
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth ; not
a head for an eye, or an eye for a tooth. He
only killed his enemies, and he always, at all
costs, defended the members of his own tribe.
"Within the tribe everything is shared in
common; every morsel of food is divided
among all present; and if the savage is alone
in the woods, he does not begin his meal un-
til he has londly shouted thrice an invitation
to any one who may hear his voice to share
his meal." "If he infringes one of the
smaller tribal rules, he is prosecuted by the
mockeries of the women." "When he enters
his neighbors' territory he must loudly an-
nounce his coming, and if he enters a house
he must deposit his hatchet at the entrance.
If one shows greediness when spoil is divided
all the others give him their share to shame
him." Scolding and scorning are greatly con-
,demned. Their children are not very quarrel-
some and very rarely fight. The most they
may say, is, "Your mother does not know
108 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
sewing/' or "Your father is blind of one eye."
The savage identified his interests with
those of his tribe; he was no individualist,
and under no circumstances would he have
consented to child labor.
When we reach the barbarians, who are con-
sidered in the fourth chapter, we enter the his-
torical period. At first sight, mutual aid seems
to be non-existent at this period. Here there
seems to be nothing but battle and bloodshed.
But the reason is not far to seek ; it is because,
until recently historians regaled us exclusiv-
ely with what has been aptly called, "drum
and trumpet history." "They hand down to
posterity the most minute descriptions of ev-
ery war, every battle and skirmish, every
contest and act of violence, every kind of in-
dividual suffering; but they hardly give any
trace of the countless acts of mutual support
and devotion which every one of us knows
from his own experience * * * The annalists
of old never failed to chronicle the petty wars
and calamities which harrassed their contem-
poraries but they paid no attention whatever
to the life of the masses, although the masses
chiefly used to toil peacefully while the few
indulged in fighting."
But Sir Henry Maine in his work on the
"Origin of International Law," has fully
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID" 109
proved that "Man lias never been so ferocious
or so stupid as to submit to such an evil as
war without some kind of an effort to prevent
it." And he has shown how exceedingly great
IS "the number of ancient institutions which
bear the marks of a design to stand in the way
of war, or to provide an alternative to it."
A pregnant suggestion is offered as to the
causes of that great migration of barbarians
which resulted in the overthrow of the Roman
empire. "It is desiccation, a quite recent desic-
cation continued still at a speed which we for-
merly were not prepared to admit. Against it
man was powerless. When the inhabitants of
North- West Mongolia and East Turkestan
saw that water was abandoning them they
had no course open to them but to move
down the broad valleys leading to the low-
lands, and to thrust westward the inhabitants
of the plains." And so the one great war
recorded of the barbarians, was thrust upon
them by absolute physical necessity.
The barbarians had no social problem, for
that private property in the means of life
which constitutes the foundation of modern
individualism, and from which tbe degrada-
tion and poverty of modern civilization results,
was unknown among them. They were com-
munists. The interest of one was the care of
no EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
all. Nothing was owned privately until it
reached the very point of consumption and
not always then, as food was largely eaten at
communal meals. This social form still sur-
vives especially in Russia, and Kropotkin
says : 'The sight of a Russian commune mow-
ing a meadow — the men rivalling each other
in their advance with the scythe, while the
women turn the grass over and throw it up
into heaps — is one of the most inspiring
sights; it shows what human work might be
and ought to be. The hay, in such case, is
divided among the separate households, and
it is evident that no one has the right of tak-
ing hay from a neighbor's stack without his
permission ; but the limitation of this last rule
among the Caucasian Ossetes is most note-
worthy. When the cuckoo cries and announ-
ces that spring is coming, and that the mead-
ows will soon be clothed again with grass,
every one in need has the right of taking from
a neighbor's stack the hay he wants for his
cattle. The old communal rights are thus re-
asserted, as if to prove how contrary un-
bridled individualism is to human nature."
When the early Christians "had all things
in common," they were not reaching forward
to modern Socialism ; they were harking back
to this primitive communism which shed itn
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL AID" m
joy and plenty on the sons and daughters of
men for a thousand generations. These bar-
barian communists were thorough democrats,
and their folkmotes, where everybody gathered
and had their say, were the only semblance of
government they possessed, and so thoroughly
were its decisions respected that no officers
were needed to enforce them. They were also
our superiors not only in refusing to work their
children, but also in scorning to beat them.
They said: "The body of the child reddens
from the stroke, but the face of him who
strikes reddens from shame."
The two chapters on "Mutual Aid in the
Medieval City" treat the guild as the chief
manifestation of the principle during this pe-
riod. A picture is presented, in some detail
of the struggle of the free cities against the
increasing encroachments of the centralizing
states. The medieval cities are finally defeat-
ed, the guilds destroyed, but the indestruct-
ible principle of mutual aid takes on new
forms and accommodates itself to new con-
ditions.
This brings us to the closing chapters on
"Mutual Aid Among Ourselves." The first of
these two chapters is devoted almost entirely
to the mutual aid habits and institutions which
still survive in the present day villages of Rus-
112 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
sia, Switzerland, France and Germany. The
last chapter takes up really modern instances
of the principle, the first and most important
are the Labor unions and their strikes. Co-
operative societies, Life-boat associations,
Charitable organizations.
The illustration of this principle which is
cited first after the Labor union is the Social-
ist movement. Kropotkin presents his con-
ception of the Socialist movement as a mani-
festation of mutual aid in existing society in
the following eloquent passage:
"Every experienced politician knows that
all great political movements were fought
upon large and often distant issues, and that
those of them were the strongest which pro-
voked most disinterested enthusiasm. All
great historical movements have had this
character, and for our own generation Social-
ism stands in that case. Taid agitators,' is,
no doubt, the favorite refrain of those who
know nothing about it. The truth however,
is that — to speak only of what I know per-
sonally — if I had kept a diary for the last
twenty-four years, the reader of such a diary
would have had the word 'heroism' constantly
on his lips. But the men I would have spoken
of were not heroes; they were average men,
inspired by a grand idea. Every Socialist
KROPOTKIN'S "MUTUAL. AID" ng
newspaper — and there are hundreds of them
in Europe alone — has the same history of
years of sacrifice without any hope of reward,
and, in the overwhelming majority of cases,
even without any personal ambition. I have
seen families living without knowing what
would be their food tomorrow, the husband
boycotted all round in his little town for his
part in the paper, and the wife supporting the
family by sewing, and such a situation last-
ing for years, until the family would retire,
without a word of reproach, simply saying:
'Continue; we can hold out no more!' I have
seen men, dying from consumption, and know-
ing it, and yet knocking about in snow and
fog to prepare meetings within a few weeks
from death, and only then retiring to the hos-
spital with the words: 'Now friends I am
done ; the doctors say I have but a few weeks
to live. Tell the comrades I shall be happy
if they come to see me.' I have seen facts
that would be described as 'idealization' if I
told them in this place; and the very names
of these men, hardly known outside a nar-
row circle of friends, will soon be forgotten
when the friends too have passed away. In
fact, I don't know myself which most to ad-
mire, the unbounded devotion of these few or
the sum total of petty acts of devotion of the
Il4 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
great number. Every quire of a penny paper
sold, every meeting, every hundred votes
which are won at a SociaHst election, repre-
sent an amount of energy and sacrifices of
which no outsider has the faintest idea. And
what is now done by Socialists has been done
by every popular and advanced party, political
and religious, in the past. All past progress
has been promoted by like men and by a like
devotion."
VII.
A REPLY TO HAECKEL.
The revolt against '"authority" has been car-
ried to ridiculous extremes. The Manchester
school individualist, Herbert Spencer, and the
metaphysical egoist, Max Stirner, would alike
agree to the reduction of all authority to the
smallest possible residue. The most reckless
of their disciples, having shut out from their
thoughts all communication with the world
of reality^ would make it impossible for six
men to pull effectively on a rope because five
of them would be obliged to recognize the
authority of the sixth, when he, at the proper
moment, should call "Heave, ho."
To thinkers of this order, music would be
impossible. Who could imagine a radical in-
dividualist bowing to a waved stick and rec-
ognizing the highly centralized authority of
the "leader." The music of the logical, au-
thority-repudiating individualist, would be the
haphazard beating of the tom-tom of the East
Indian, and not the highly regulated strains of
a modern orchestra.
This folly is equalled, if not out-done, by
those who refuse to recognize authority in
115
116 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
science and thought. When a man claims to
have a new and fundamental discovery in
astronomy, and at the same time speaks
slightingly of the researches of physicists such
as Newton, Kant, and Laplace, it is fairly safe
to conclude that you are listening to a fool
who has nothing to say worthy of a second
thought. Not until one has trodden every
rung of the ladder which has been previously
trodden, is he able to mount a step higher.
And it is the performance of this task, wholly,
or at least in the first part, that constitutes the
one so doing an "authority."
How often does one hear an addle-brained,
know-nothing say: "I recognize no authority;
I think for myself." How shall one think with-
out ideas? And how is it possible to obtain
ideas apart from the acquisition of knowl-
edge? And where can knowledge be obtained
except from those who have it?
All "authority" in science and thought is
founded on knowledge of the subject in ques-
tion. Socialists quote Karl Marx as an au-
thority on political economy, because his writ-
ings prove that he knew more about the pro-
duction and distribution of wealth than any
man of his century. Lavoisier is an authority
in chemistry, because he know more about the
A REPLY TO HAECKEL. HV
composition of substances than any three of
his contemporaries.
But much confusion has been wrought, hy-
men of undisputed authority in their own
field, pronouncing positive verdicts in depart-
ments where their opinions had no value.
What a great composer has to say about the
value of a certain note must be respectfully
considered as being of importance, but, un-
less he has studied geology, his opinions on
the probable origin or age of the Rocky Moun-
tains will have no more value, and may have
less than those of the policeman on the near-
est corner.
An excellent example of the confusion
which may arise in this way, was given to
the world in 1877, at the Congress of Natur-
alists held at Munich in September of that
year. At that time the naturalists of Europe
were divided into two opposing camps, one
accepting and the other rejecting the Darwin-
ian theory of "natural selection.'' The leaders
of both divisions were Germans, though a
preponderance of the Germans favored Dar-
win, whilst the French, still under the influ-
ence of, or agreeing with, Flourens, although
he had been dead a decade, were almost
unanimously opposed.
The honors of leading the fight for Darwin-
318 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
ism, at the Munich Congress, fell to Haeckel,
and on the i8th of September he threw down
the gage in a brilliant address in which he de-
fended the ideas of the great Englishman.
Haeckel also advocated the teaching of evolu-
tion in the schools. The battle raged back
and forth between the two armies, until
Virchow, the great pathologist, dropped a
bombshell in the Congress by boldly asserting :
"Darwinism leads directly to Socialism."
Here biological arguments ceased. The only
thing in order was to clear the skirts of Dar-
winism of the terrible charge of being social-
istic. Of course this task fell to Haeckel, and
he was loyally assisted by Oscar Schmidt.
Writing in "Ausland" two months later
Schmidt said: "If the Socialists were prudent
they would do their utmost to kill by silent
neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory
most emphatically proclaims that the Social-
ist ideas are impracticable."
Haeckel replied to Virchow at some length,
and as that reply is rather difficult to obtain
I will give it here in full as quoted by Ferri,
and translated by Robert Rives La Monte:
"As a matter of fact, there is no scientific
doctrine which proclaims more openly than
the theory of descent, that the equality of in-
dividuals, toward which Socialism tends, is an
A REPLY TO HAECKEL HO
impossibility, that this chimerical equality is
in absolute contradiction with the necessary
and, in fact, universal inequality of individu-
als.
"Socialism demands for all citizens equal
rights, equal duties, equal possessions and
equal enjoyments ; the theory of descent estab-
lishes, on the contrary, that the realization of
these) hopes is purely and simply impossible ;
that in human societies, as in animal socie-
ties, neither the rights, nor the duties, nor the
possessions, nor the enjoyments of all the
members of a society are or ever can be equal.
'The great law of variation teaches — both
in the general theory of evolution and in the
smaller field of biology where it becomes the
theory of descent — that the variety of phe-
nomena flows from an original unity, the div-
ersity of functions from a primitive identity,
and the complexity of organization from a
primordial simplicity. The conditions of ex-
istence for all individuals are, from their very
birth, unequal. There must also be taken into
consideration the inherited qualities and the
innate tendencies, which also vary more or
less widely. In view of all this, how can the
work and the reward be equal for all?
"The more highly the social life is devel-
oped, the more important becomes the great
120 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
principle of the division of labor, the more
requisite it becomes for the stable existence
of the state as a whole that its members should
distribute among themselves the multifarious
tasks of life, each performing a single func-
tion; and as the labor which must be per-
formed by the individuals, as well as the ex-
penditure of strength, talent, money, etc.f
which it necessitates, differs more and more,
it is natural that the remuneration of this la-
bor must also vary widely. These are facts so
simple and so obvious that it seems to me
every intelligent and enlightened statesman
ought to be an advocate of the theory of
descent and the general doctrine of evolution
as the best antidote for the absurd equalitar-
ian, Utopian notions of the Socialists.
"And it was Darwinism, the theory of selec-
tion, that Virchow, in his denunciation, had
in mind, rather than the mere metamorphic
development, the theory of descent, with which
it is always confused ! Darwinism is anything
rather than socialistic.
"If one wishes to attribute a political tend-
ency to this English theory — which is quite
permissible — this tendency can be nothing
but aristocratic; by no means can it be de-
mocratic, still less socialistic.
"The theory of selection teaches that in the
A REPLY TO HAECKEL 121
life of mankind, as in that of plants and ani-
mals, it is always and everywhere a small and
privileged minority alone which succeeds in
living and developing itself; the immense ma-
jority, on the contrary suffer and succumb
more or less prematurely. Countless are the
seeds and eggs of every species of plants and
animals, and the young individuals who issue
from them. But the number of those who
have the good fortune to reach fully devel-
oped maturity and to attain the goal of their
existence is relatively insignificant.
"The cruel and pitiless 'struggle for exist-
ence' which rages everywhere through ani-
mated nature, and which in the nature of
things must rage, this eternal and inexorable
competition between all living beings is an
undeniable fact. Only a small picked number
of the strongest or fittest is able to come forth
victoriously from this battle of competition.
The great majority of their unfortunate com-
petitors are inevitably destined to perish. It
is well enough to deplore this tragic fatality,
but one cannot deny or change it. 'Many are
called, but few are chosen!'
"The selection, the 'election' of these 'elect'
is by absolute necessity bound up with the
rejection or destruction of the vast multitude
of beings whom they survived. And so an-
122 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
Other learned Englishman has called the fun-
damental principle of Darwinism 'the survival
of the fittest, the victory of the best.'
"At all events the principle of selection is
not in the slightest degree democratic; it is,
on the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If
then, Darwinism, carried out to its ultimate
logical consequences, has, according to Vir-
chow, for the statesman 'an extraordinarily
dangerous side ' the danger is doubtless that
it favors aristocratic aspirations."
And now let us turn to the closing pages
of the second volume of Haeckel's valuable
work, "The History of Creation." We shall
find it interesting and instructive to observe
the nature of the argument which he there
uses with great effect against Virchow. Vir-
chow had delivered his celebrated address at
Berlin, which closed as follows: "It is abso-
lutely certain that Man is not descended from
apes."
Haeckel takes this up, gives a resume of the
facts known to zoology on this point, and then
winds up with the following: "In view of
this state of affairs, we zoologists^ recognized
as authorities on the subject, may surely ask,
How can many so-called anthropologists still
maintain that there exists no sort of actual
proofs of the 'Derivation of Man from Apes'?
A REPLY TO HAECKEL 123
How can Virchow, Ranke, and others, who
are not zoologists, in the speeches they annu-
ally deliver at anthropological and other con-
gresses, continue to declare that this 'Pithe-
coid thesis' is an empty hypothesis, an un-
proved assertion, and a mere dream of the
philosophers of nature? How can these an-
thropologists still continue to ask for 'certain
proofs' of this thesis when proofs with all
the clearness that could be desired lie before
them, and are unanimously recognized by all
zoologists? As regards Virchow's often
quoted declarations against the Pithecoid
thesis, they have obtained great favor in wide
circles, only because of the high authority
this famous naturalist enjoys in an entirely
different domain of science. His 'cellular pa.th-
ology,' his ingenious application of the cell-
theory to the whole province of medicine,
introduced a grand advance in that branch of
science thirty years ago. This great and last-
ing service rendered by him has, however, no
connection whatever with the unyielding and
negative position which, unfortunately, Vir-
chow persists in assuming towards the doc-
trine of evolution.''
It probably never occurred to Haeckel that
the argument which he here uses to meet
Virchow's opposition to evolution, would
124 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
serve quite as effectively as a reply to his
own opposition to Socialism.
As regards Haeckel's "often quoted declara-
tions against" Socialism, "they have obtained
great favor in wide circles, only because of
the high authority which this famous natur-
alist enjoys in an entirely diflferent domain of
science. His biogenetic principle, discovered
in embryology, "introduced a grand advance
in that science thirty years ago. This great
and lasting service rendered by him has, how-
ever no connection whatever with the un-
yielding and negative position which, unfor-
tunately," Haeckel "persists in assuming to-
wards the doctrine of" Socialism.
Haeckers complaint that Virchow could not
judge the merits of evolution because he was
not a zoologist, is well taken. But the Social-
ist has as good or better right to assert that
Haeckel was incapable of estimating the rela-
tionship of Socialism to Darwinism, for he cer-
tainly knew a good deal less about Socialism
than Virchow knew of zoology.
This is precisely the trouble with Haeckel's
criticism of what he calls Socialism. Of the
theories of Karl Marx and the modern scienti-
fic Socialists, he knew absolutely nothing. The
Socialism he condemned had been abandoned
A REPLY TO HAECKEL 125
by the Socialists themselves, nearly thirty
years before his criticism was made.
"Absurd equalitarian notions," granted ; but
they were not even the sole property of the
Utopian Socialists. They borrowed them from
the bourgeois revolutionists of 1789. It was
they who boasted of the equality they would
set up. That equality, which, as Engels says,
only "materialized in bourgeois equality be-
fore the law." — "The equality before the law
of all commodity-owners." It was this
struggling bourgeoisie that adopted as its
catch-words, "liberty, fraternity, equality,"
and applied them to a typical bourgeois use
when they inscribed them above the entrances
to French prisons.
A significant clause in the second sentence
of Haeckers criticism is, "in human societies
as in animal societies," the duties, etc., of the
members cannot be "equal." The only pos-
sible point this could have as a criticism of
Socialism, would be its use to deny the pos-
sibility of abolishing social class divisions.
There is nothing to show whether Haeckel in-
tended it to have such a specific application,
but as any other application it might have
could be in no way opposed to the Socialist
position, I need only show its failure in that
regard.
126 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
"Bee'' society may be said to have class
divisions, and it must be conceded that these
classes cannot be abolished by anything that
could, by any stretch of the imagination, be
called "bee socialism." But the reason for this
is not far to seek and, when found, it makes
any argument by analogy, against Socialism,
impossible. Bee workers are "physiologically"
incapable of discharging any other function in
bee society. They are females, incapable of
maternity. As a result of this the queen bee
is obliged to shoulder the whole burden of the
reproduction of the species, and she is speci-
alized in this direction to such an extent, that
she could not possibly be a worker. The drone,
as the male breeder, is in the same fix, and
the popular notion that they are useless loaf-
ers, has its origin in the bee custom of apply-
ing the boot, or something worse, to all super-
fluous members of the drone class.
"A hive of bees," says Prof. Huxley, "is
an organic polity, a society in which the part
played by each member is determined by or-
ganic necessities. Queens, workers, and drones
are, so to speak, castes divided from one an-
other by marked physical barriers."
Says Ernest Untermann in his fine chapter
on this question, in "Marxian Economics":
"Every textbook on natural history describes
A REPLY TO HAECKEL 127
the different orders. For instance, the socie-
ties of bees are 'monarchies', those of ants 're-
publics'. But in either case, biological varia-
tion determines the form of these societies.
Queen bees, drones, and workers are of or-
ganically different structure and equipped
with different specialized organs. The queen
bee is equipped only for the duties of con-
ception and the laying of eggs. The drone
cannot perform any other function but that
of fertilizing the queen. The worker alone has
organs for gathering flower dust, honey, and
manufacturing wax." Class divisions in bee
society are therefore "biological" and not
economic. But Haeckel's comparison ignores
this vital distinction. Before this argument
can be used against the Socialist advocacy of
class abolition, it must be shown that a queen
cannot wash clothes with starvation as an
alternative, and that a pleb woman could not
wear a coronet, should her father invest in
a busted duke.
True there are other animal societies which
have no such biological division. But these
have no private property in the means of life,
and therefore no classes. Pelicans and crows
recognize only three grounds as justification
for idleness — infancy, old age and sickness or
accident.
128 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
A recent Socialist writer said: *'Take two
babies together — the worker's baby and the
parasite's baby. There they are, both of them,
out of the great mystery. Examine their soft
little bodies. Do you see spurs on the one
and a saddle on the other? And yet, one is
to grow up a profligate loafer, and the other
a starved and beaten worker. One to rot at
the top ; the other to be stunted and oppressed
at the bottom."
Of course these two babies would not be
equal, either actually or potentially, but is
that any reason why they should be given an
unequal start? How are we to find out which
is the best in any sense, if a multitude of op-
portunities open to the one are to be closed to
the other?
And here Haeckel's implied parallel breaks
down once more. In nature the strong and
capable survive in the struggle for existence;
nature gives something like a fair field and
no favor. But in capitalist society, a puling
son of a rich father is coddled to maturity,
and reproduces others of his kind; while the
lusty child of a worker is murdered by poison-
ous milk, or debarred from marriage by low
wages.
In nature, "fittest" does not mean best in
any moral sense, except indirectly, as that the
A REPLY TO HAECKEL 129
practice of certain moral principles in animal
societies may constitute, or add to, fitness. But
in present society in a vast number of in-
stances, fitness does not mean "best" even to
the extent that such a word may be used in the
natural world.
A real estate "shark'' is a libel on the fish.
An indispensable qualification in business is to
have few scruples and be a first-class liar.
Honesty and suicide are synonomous terms.
The statement that natural selection "favors
aristocratic aspirations," involves the same fal-
lacy. It assumes that aristocrats are on top
because of fitness to be there. Recent revela-
tions in Berlin indicate that the aristocrats of
Haeckel's own country are "fittest" for the
garbage can.
Haeckel's main position is that "the struggle
for existence" in nature is a justification for
"competition" in society. To begin with,
Kropotkin has shown that Haeckel grossly
misrepresents nature when hQ speaks of "the
cruel, pitiless 'struggle for existence' which
rages everywhere throughout animated na-
ture and "between all living beings." When
this is used as a defense of present society, it is
equal to saying that human society should
seek its models among the lowest forms of
organic life rather than the highest. Haeckel's
180 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
position was taken by Spencer and received
the following clever reply from Prof. Ritchie:
"The struggle among plants and the lower
animals is mainly between members of the
same species; and the individual competition
between human beings, which is so much ad-
mired by Mr . Spencer, is of this primitive
kind."
Kropotkin says : "If we ask nature 'who are
the fittest, those who are continually at war
with each other, or those who support one
another?' we at once see that those animals
which acquire habits of mutual aid are un-
doubtedly the fittest."
As to the desirability of that "pitiless strug-
gle," Huxley pertinently says: "Of all the
shapes which society has taken, that most
nearly approaches perfection in which the war
of the individual against the individual is most
strictly limited."
Whatever may be the truth among the
protozoa, we are safe in applying to society the
statement of Ruskin : "Co-operation is always
and everywhere the law of life ; competition is
always and everywhere the law of death."
Human society eventually reaches a point of
development where nature's haphazard ways
arc interfered with, and man arranges means
to an end. Professor Schiaparelli thought he
A REPLY TO HAECKEL IBl
saw canals on Mars, and inferred intelligent
inhabitants. The difference in water-ways, be-
tween blind nature and a designing intelli-
gence, is the difference between a rambling
river and a straight canal.
Now human society has arrived at a stage
where its consciousness of itself and the pos-
sibility of self-arrangement, becomes a factor.
This is a tremendous step forward, and its
future possibilities seem to be illimitable. Be-
fore this can be largely effective, however, it
will be necessary to thoroughly understand all
fundamental social laws.
We had no rod to rule the lightning until we
knew the laws of its movement. There will be
no real airship until we master the laws of
aerial flight. Socialism solves the social
problem, not because it has, but because it
is, an explanation of the laws of social develop-
ment in general, and of existing society in
particular. On these laws our faith is founded.
By consciously arranging the social institu-
tions which so profoundly affect our lives, in
harmony with these laws, we shall cease to be
the slaves of a blind necessity.
As Engels has well said: "Manx's social
organization, hitherto confronting him as a
necessity imposed by Nature and history, now
becomes the result of his own free action. The
1S2 fiVOLUl^iON, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
extraneous objective forces, that have hitherto
governed history, pass under the control of
man himself. Only from that time will man
himself more and more consciously, make his
own history — only from that time will the
social causes set in motion by him have, in
the main and in a constantly growing measure,
the results intended by him. It is the ascent
of man from the kingdom of necessity to the
kingdom of freedom."
VIII.
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM/'
The crowning generalization of modern
thought is that which presents the Universe as
a unity, inter-related in all its parts. By it,
the defenders of dualism are discredited, and
their theological, metaphysical philosophy is
thrown aside. It is no longer God and Man,
nor even Man and God, but Man only, with
God an anthropomorphic shadow, related to
man not as his creator, but as created by him.
God and Man are not "two/' but in reality
"one."
Modern science has reversed the order of
their appearance, and also the order of their
dependence. That which seemed to our prim-
itive ancestors a living reality, a separate and
independent being, proves, when submitted to
the tests of anthropology and psychology, to
have been a creature of their own dreams.
And thus, as a result of scientific research
into the origin of dualism and the nature of
dreams, as Professor Clifford says: "The dim
and shadowy outline of the superhuman deity
fades slowly from before us; and as the mist
133
134 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
of his presence floats aside, we perceive with
greater and greater clearness, the shape of a
yet grander and nobler figure — the figure of
him who made all Gods and shall unmalce
them. From the dim dawn of history, and from
the inmost depths of every soul, the face of
our father man looks out upon us, with the fire
of eternal youth in his eyes, and says : 'Before
Jehovah was, I am.' "
The thinker who would expand his intel-
lectual wings in this monistic atmosphere,
must possess not only a "discriminating" mind,
but also, as Marcus Hitch suggests, a "unify-
ing" mind. There are two errors he must
avoid ; the creation of distinctions that do not
exist and the ignoring of distinctions that do.
The chief sinner against this first canon of
dialectical thinking is our old friend the theolo-
gian. When the evolutionary naturalists
demonstrated the hopeless untruth of his
"revealed" legends about the origin of men
and thmgs, he sought refuge in the ingenious
theory that these fables while scientifically in-
defensible were, notwithstanding, spiritually
true. In short, scientific truth and spiritual
truth were so distinct as to have no vital re-
lations. These "artful dodgers" have relieved
controversial literature of much of its wonted
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 185
heaviness and contributed generally to the
gaiety of the nations.
Socialists have always been among the first
to enjoy these entertaining performances, and
it seems like divine retribution when these
same theological and "Reverend" persons
tumble over into the Socialist camp and bring
their obsolete methods of thinking with them.
They dub themselves "Christian" Socialists
and proceed to show that "Socialism is a
philosophy concerning the social and economic
life of man, and not the religious at all." When
Marx declared that political and legal and
other social institutions and ideas were the
result of economic conditions and class inter-
ests, religious institutions and ideas were, of
course, exempt.
After a mental contortion like that, what is
to prevent a reconciliation between the 17th
century twaddle of the methodist pulpit and
the materialist conception of history?
Those who break the second canon given,
are not all theologians. Among those who
ignore distinctions that do exist, the biological
sociologist is entitled to conspicuous mention.
August Comte, who "attempted to make of
sociology a sort of transcendental biology,"
had at least this excuse that he wrote his
positivist philosophy before Darwin published
136 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
his "Origin of Species " and, therefore, while
biology was yet in long clothes and sociology
was unborn. Although Comte is generally re-
garded as the founder of sociology, these
limitations made it impossible to do little more
than invent the name and foresee its possibility.
These excuses, however, can scarcely be in-
voked for Haeckel, who, as we have already
seen, wholly ignored in his inferences, funda-
mental differences between the division of
labor in animal societies and that division in
human societies. Haeckel's biological sociology
conveniently overlooks the rather important
fact that while a working bee can not by any
possibility act as a drone, the working man
has at least no physical disabilities to prevent
him from doing anything that pertains to the
role of a prince. Reasoning by analogy is
always dangerous, especially when the analogy
itself breaks down.
While it is well to keep these rules in mind,
it must be conceded that their critical applica-
tion is somewhat limited when we come to
Spencer's famous analogy between animal
organisms and human societies. The *'syn-
thetic" philosopher was much Haeckers
superior in sociology, and he possessed an
immense fund of bioloo^ical lore that was
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 137
unavailable to Comte writing a quarter of a
century earlier.
Thus Spencer seems to recognize that his
essay on "The Social Organism" is largely an
ingenious analogy, from which conclusions
must be drawn with caution. Not that bour-
geois scientists have always exhibited a very
scientific temper in this regard. On the
contrary they have, on every possible occasion,
proclaimed that certain alleged truths in
physics or biology were in irreconcilable con-
tradiction to certain Socialist conclusions in
sociology.
But we may find a key to Spencer's chariness
in the matter of drawing conclusions in the
rather surprising fact, which will appear
presently, that the one legitimate conclusion
which the analogy will thoroughly sustain, is
an exact contradiction to all that Spencer had
ever proclaimed on social questions.
The essay itself, like a great deal of
Spencer's writing, is prolix and wearisome, so
we shall select only his most important and
striking comparisons.
The introduction is excellent and has for its
text Sir James Mackintosh's great saying —
great in his non-evolutionary age though very
common-place today — "Constitutions are not
made, but grow." He then declares "the central
138 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
idea of Plato's model republic'' to be ''the
correspondence between the parts of a society
and the faculties of the human mind."
Hobbes, the philosopher of Malmesbury,
comes next with his celebrated "Leviathan/*
Hobbes sought to establish a still more definite
parallelism; not, however between a society
and the mind, but between a society and
the human body. Hobbes' "Leviathan" was
the Commonwealth and he "carries this com-
parison so far as to actually give a drawing of
the Leviathan — a vast human-shaped figure,
whose body and limbs are made up of mul-
titudes of men."
Spencer criticizes these analogies of Plato
and Hobbes in detail, but finds the chief error
of both writers to consist in the assumption by
both "that the organization of a society is
comparable, not simply to the organization of
a living body in general, but to the organiza-
tion of a human body in particular. There is
no warrant whatever for assuming this. It is
in no way implied by the evidence; and is
simply one of those fancies which we com-
monly find mixed up with the truths of early
speculation." But, insists Spencer: "The un-
tenableness of the particular parallelisms above
instanced, is no ground for denying an es-
sential parallelism ; since early ideas are
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 139
usually but vague adumbrations of the truth."
Lacking the great generalizations of bio-
logy, it was, as we have said, "impossible to
trace out the real relations of special organiza-
tions to organizations of another order."
Therefore he proposes "to show what are the
analogies which modern science discloses."
Spencer then discovers four points in which
an individual organism and a society agree,
and four in which they differ. The points of
agreement are:
(i.) "That commencing as small aggrega-
tions, they insensibly augment in mass; some
of them eventually reaching ten thousand
times what they originally were."
(2.) "That while at first so simple in
structure as to be considered structureless,
they assume in the course of their growth
a continually increasing complexity of
structure."
(3.) "That though in their early, un-
developed states, there exists in them scarcely
any mutual dependence of parts, their parts
gradually acquire a mutual dependence ; which
becomes at last so great, that the activity and
life of each part is made possible only by the
activity and life of the rest."
(4.) "That the life of a society is inde-
pendent of, and far more prolonged than the
140 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
lives of any of its component units; who are
severally born, grow, work, reproduce, and die,
while the body politic composed of them sur-
vives generation after generation, increasing
in mass, in completeness of structure, and in
functional activity."
The four points of difference are :
(i.) "That societies have no specific ex-
ternal forms."
(2.) "That though the living tissue where-
of an individual organism consists, forms a
continuous mass, the living elements of a so-
ciety do not form a continuous mass; but are
more or less widely dispersed over some por-
tion of the earth's surface."
(3.) "That while the ultimate living ele-
ments of an individual organism are mostly
fixed in their relative positions, those of the
social organism are capable of moving from
place to place."
(4.) "The last and perhaps the most im-
portant distinction is, that while in the body
of an animal only a special tissue is endowed
with feeling, in a society all the members are
endowed with feeling."
It is worthy of note that, while Spencer
finds the parallelisms to increase in significance
the more they are examined, the differences
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 141
tend to break down when they are worked out
in detail.
The advantage which Spencer had over
Plato and Hobbes is very clearly seen in the
first and fourth parallelisms, neither of which
could have been made until twenty-one years
before, when in 1839, Theodore Schwann de-
veloped his great theory that the body is an
organized society of interconnected cells. "The
importance of this theory," says Professor
Thatcher, "can hardly be estimated. It gave
an entirely new view to animal and vegetable
life." At any rate, it served Spencer greatly
in this essay.
The next ten pages are devoted to organic
development from the protozoa, the lowest
tiny animal forms, to Crustacea — crabs etc., —
which are materially higher in the animal
scale. This development is marked by increas-
ing mutual dependence of parts and a growing
division of labor. It is compared to the de-
velopment of society from primitive Bushmen
to the early Anglo-Saxons, during which cor-
responding phenomena are traced.
He escapes Haeckel's blunder at least to the
extent of calling the two divisions of labor by
their proper names. Among animals it is the
"physiological" division of labor; in society,
the "economical" division of labor. Whether
142 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
he would have been able to still perceive that
distinction in dealing with those ant and bee
communities where Haeckel got lost, there is
nothing to show.
Spencer's middle-class predilections come
out strongly, and a very pretty physiological
justification is provided for that wholly ad-
mirable section of the community.
The first step in the development of an em-
bryo is its division into two main layers of
cells — the mucous layer and the serous layer,
The mucous layer, that fine inside skin of the
body so to speak, absorbs nutriment. But
that nutriment must be transferred to the
serous layer which builds up the nerves and
muscles. Presently there arises between these
two a third — the vascular layer. Out of this
third layer the chief blood vessels are de-
veloped and these vessels serve to transport
the nutriment from the inn^r or mucous layer,
which gathers it, to the outer or serous layer,
which uses it for the whole organization's up-
building.
"Well," says Spencer, "may we not trace a
parallel step in social progress? Between the
governing and the governed, there at first exists
no intermediate class; and even in some so-
cieties that have reached considerable size,
there are scarcely any but the nobles and their
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 148
kindred on the one hand, and their serfs on the
other; the social structure being such that
transfer of commodities takes place directly
from slaves to their masters. But in societies
of a higher type, there grows up, between these
two primitive classes, another — the trading or
middle class. Equally at first as now, we may
see that, speaking generally, this middle class
is the analogue of the middle layer in the
embryo."
It is a pity to disturb this serene com-
placency, by pointing out that the real trans-
porters of commodities are not the members of
the middle class who, as a rule, do little and
live well, but that section of the working class
which mans freight trains, drives teams and
shoves trucks. As for that ''higher" class of
cells which receives these commodities and
consumes them while usefully engaged in
building up the nervous and muscular system ;
such comparison could only apply to society's
brain workers, and it contains no justification
for the useless parasitic type represented by
such charming persons as Harry Thaw and
Reggie Vanderbilt.
Another very interesting point is Spencer's
physiological vindication of profit. The limbs,
glands, or other members of an animal are de-
veloped by exercise. But in order "that any
144 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
organ in a living being may grow by exercise,
there needs to be a due supply of blood." All
action implies waste; blood brings the mate-
rials for repair; and before there can be
growth, the quantity of blood supplied must
be more than is requisite for repair.
"In a society it is the same. If to some
district which elaborates for the community
particular commodities — say the woolens of
Yorkshire — there comes an augmented de-
mand ; and if in fulfillment of this demand, a
certain expenditure and wear and tear of the
manufacturing organization are incurred ;
and if, in payment for the extra quantity of
woolens sent away there comes back only
such quantity of commodities as replaces the
expenditure, and makes good the waste of life
and machinery; there can clearly be no
growth. That there may be growth, the com-
modities obtained in return must be more than
sufficient for these ends ; and just in proportion
as the surplus is great will the growth be
rapid. Whence it is manifest that what in
commercial affairs we call profit, answers to
the excess of nutrition over waste in a living
body."
This is "physiologicar' political economy
with a vengeance and shows to what straits
bourgeois apologists are reduced to find a
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" 145
justification of that exploitation of labor which
is the only source of profit. In concluding this
point Spencer seems to satirize his own posi-
tion and at the same time gives something that
looks very much like a socialist explanation of
panics. He says: "And if in the body-politic
some part has been stimulated into great pro-
ductivity, and afterwards can not get paid for
all its produce, certain of its members become
bankrupt, and it decreases in size."
The truth of the whole matter is that Spen-
cer IS wholly at sea the moment he touches
political economy, and in place of some ele-
mentary knowledge on that subject, we have
the obsolete theories of the Manchester School
proclaimed in the name of physiology.
Then follows a series of very ingenious com-
parisons. Following Liebig, he compares coins
to blood corpuscles calling the later blood-
discs to enhance the analogy and concludes:
"throughout extensive divisions of the lower
animals, the blood contains no corpuscles ; and
in societies of low civilization, there is no
money."
Then the development of bloodvessels in
lower animals is compared to the development
of roads in primitive societies; their greater
perfection in higher animals comparing with
the railroads which more effectively convey
146 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
food Stuffs to the centers of population. Amid
much that is fantastic and tedious, he says:
"And in railways we also see, for the first time
in the social organism, a system of double
channels conveying currents in opposite di-
rections as do the arteries and veins of a well-
developed animal."
"We come at length," says Spencer, "to the
nervous system." This is by far the most in-
teresting item in Spencer's catalogue, because
it is here that the evolutionary philosopher and
the Manchester School politician come into
open contradiction.
"We have now to compare the appliances by
which a society as a whole, is regulated, with
those by which the movements of an individual
creature are regulated."
Beginning with the nervous systems of
lower animals he discovers their inferiority to
lie in the absence of a controlling center. The
lower Annulosa is composed of a series of ring-
like segments. Each ring has its own nerve
ganglia linked by connecting nerves, but "very
incompletely dependent on any general con-
trolling power. Hence it results that when the
body is cut in two, the hinder part continues
to move forward under the propulsion of its
numerous legs; and that when the chain of
gang-lia has been divided without severing the
SPENCER'S "SOCIAL ORGANISM" U7
body, the hind limbs may be seen trying to
propel the body in one direction, while the
fore limbs are trying to propel it in another/'
As we move up in the animal world the
nervous system culminates in a centralized
brain, and similarly as society becomes more
complex, government appears.
And now the great apostle of the non-inter-
ference of government with the life of society
is driven into the glaring contradiction of con-
tending that the highest animal organization
is that in which the brain, which he compares
to government in society, interferes and con-
trols most effectively.
"Strange as the assertion will be thought,"
he says, "our Houses of Parliament discharge,
in the social economy, functions which are in
sundry respects comparable to those dis-
charged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate
animal." Strange indeed! Especially to Mr,
Spencer's disciples.
Then Mr. Spencer discovers that the kind of
brain activity displayed by the highest animals
best compares with that form of government
called "representative."
He says: "It is the nature of those great
and latest-developed ganglia which distinguish
the higher animals, to interpret and combine
the multiplied and varied impressions conveyed
148 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
to them from all parts of the system, and to
regulate the actions in such a way as duly to
regard them all ; so it is in the nature of those
great and latest-^developed legislative bodies
which distinguish the most advanced societies,
to interpret and combine the wishes of all
classes and localities and to make laws in
harmony with the general wants."
It would seem from this that, a society
whose government represents only the inter-
ests of a handful of the community while the
great majority are uncared for, is suffering
from social paralysis.
Before we pass to the next chapter where
we shall examine the position presented in
"The Man Versus The State" we will observe
one break in Spencer's analogy which he fails
to notice.
When the brain of an animal is wrecked the
animal dies; it has no choice. But when the
brain of a society fails to represent the inter-
ests of the mass of the people who compose
that society, or when the social brain runs
amuck and invites disaster, society may take
its choice, it may elect to die or — it may get
a new brain.
IX.
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM.
Individualism is dead.
As a theory, it has gone with Stahl's "Phlo-
giston," Cuvier's "Cataclysms," and Goethe's
"Theory of Colors" to the museum of history.
The revolution in philosophy, which covers
the nineteenth century and reaches back into
the closing decades of the eighteenth, has met
and overthrown it at every point. Today it
lingers in the world of thought a reminiscence
of a prior stage of social development, as the
imperfect remnant of the "third eyelid" re-
mains in our bodies a surviving rudiment, a
legacy that links us with our extinct ancestors
of the Silurian age.
The greatest name ever thrown into the
scales for Individualism and against Socialism
is that of Herbert Spencer. He has the repu-
tation of having been the greatest Individualist
of all times.
Many people, including Socialists, who are
not familiar with the works of Spencer won-
der how it comes to pass that the. great evolu-
tionary philosopher could defend a theory so
149
150 EVOLUTION. SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
obsolete and anti-evolutionary as Individual-
ism. With this problem solved, Individualism
is practically disposed of — at least, its greatest
prop is gone.
All careful students of the works of the
"Synthetic" philosopher, eventually recognize
the dual personality of Mr. Spencer; the "Dr.
Jekyll" of evolution, and the "Mr. Hyde'' of
Individualism.
The last chapter dealt mainly with the
former; this chapter will treat chiefly of the
latter.
Mr. Spencer's chief utterances against what
he conceived to be Socialism and in favor of
Individualism are to be found in a volune of
four essays entitled, "The Man Versus the
State." In this book Mr. Spencer complains
bitterly of the rapid extension of government
interference in the England of his day. He
declares these "Acts of Parliament" to be a
greater and greater restriction of the individual
rights of the citizen.
Here are a few of the Acts which Spencer
denounced: An Act directing the Board of
Trade to record the draught of sea-going
vessels leaving port, and another to fix the
number of life-boats and the life-saving ap-
pliances such vessels should carry. An Act
making illegal a mine with a single shaft: The
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 151
inspection of white lead works to compel the
owners to provide overalls, respirators, baths,
acidulated drinks, etc., for the workmen: Pro-
viding for the inspection of gas works : Making
compulsory regulations for extinguishing fires
in London ; Taxing the locality for local drain-
age ; That bake-houses should have a periodical
lime washing, and a cleaning with soap and
hot water at least once in six months; To se-
cure decent lodgings for persons picking fruit
and vegetables for public consumption; To
provide free compulsory education and public
schools; The Public Libraries Act; All the
Factory Acts limiting child labor or enforcing
the protection of dangerous machinery; The
Preservation of Seabirds Act; The establish-
ment of state telegraphy; Proposals to feed
children; Government endowment of scienti-
fic research; etc.
All these measures, and many others of
similar nature, excited the indignation of the
greatest prophet of Individualism because,
forsooth, they modified somebody's right to
do as he pleased about something. Luckily
for England, Mr. Spencer and a handful of
his individualist disciples stood alone, while
the electorate carried these laws through their
highest tribunals.
One can imagine the *'joy of living" in an
152 EVOLUTION. SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
individualist arcadia fashioned after Mr. Spen-
cer's own heart. A working man would be
able to take up the occupation of a sailor. He
could embark on the rotten old tub of some
greedy shipowner, insured for many times its
value, loaded to the gunwales and sure to sink
when it got out of sight of land to where the
water was a little rougher than plate glass.
Of course he would be living under a system
of "voluntary co-operation" and "freedom of
contract" and if he didn't wish to go to sea
he could stay at home and — starve. There
would be very little work in port unloading
ships, as so many of them would never re-
turn to be unloaded. When the insurance
money was paid the shipowner could give a
banquet and hold forth on the individual right
)0f the sailor to get drowned in the interests
of commerce without the government meddl-
ing about life boats and other expensive and
nonsensical appliances.
If he preferred cO work on "terra firma" he
might get a job in a mine with only one shaft
which in case of firedamp would be converted
into a furnace. Then as there would be no
way to get out, no socialistically inclined per-
son would be able to dispute his individual
right to stay in. If he preferred the white lead
industry he might "get in" there, and there
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 153
being no respirators, baths, or acidulated
drinks he could be a physical wreck in a year
and a corpse in two. Or he might try the gas-
works and, there being no inspectors, there
would be nothing to interfere with his in-
dividual right to be asphyxiated in an oven
or roasted in a retort.
As wages would be small, unions not being
individualist institutions, he might get a cheap
room in the top of an hotel without fire
escapes, in a town with no fire engines. He
could live cheaply on bread from bakehouses
that never knew lime washings and had not
seen hot water or soap for over six months,
and eat fruit and vegetables handled by peo-
ple who were not troubled with decent, let
alone sanitary, lodgings.
He would have the liberty to stay at man-
ual labor as there would be no public schools
or libraries to assist him to qualify for any
profession such as, for instance, journalism.
This would, no doubt, be a blessing in dis-
guise, for if he became a writer, instead of
following the brilliant example of Mr. Spen-
cer, he might misuse his powers to the detri-
ment of the race by advocating the limitation,
or even the abolition, of child labor. If he
married he might be at liberty to sew on his
154 EVOLUTION, SOCl^iL AND ORGANIC
own buttons, his wife having left her fingers
among the cogs of uncovered machinery.
Such would be the social heaven, operated
on the principles of the ''Manchester'' school
of politics, which mark the high-water of In-
dividualism, and of which Herbert Spencer
was the chief apostle.
Compare this attitude of mind with that of
the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, over
whom Spencer had the advantage of the lapse
of a period of seventy years. In 1815 Owen
convened a large number of cotton manufac-
turers at Glasgow, Scotland, to consider the
state of the cotton trade which was then
in great distress. To that conference he
presented two proposals; one to help the
masters, the other to benefit the workers.
The first was that they should petition
parliament for the repeal of the tariff on
raw cotton; the second that they should re-
quest parliament to shorten the working
hours, and otherwise improve the conditions
of workers in the mills. The first proposal
carried unanimously, but the one on which
Owen's heart was set, was not even seconded.
Knowing as he did the terrible condition of
the English working class of that period, the
callous brutality of these rapacious masters
roused him to irony and defiance. He deliv-
ered an address to the conference which he
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 155
had printed and spread broadcast in every
corner of the country.
This is how the lion turned on the jackals:
"True indeed it is that the main pillar and
prop of the political greatness and prosperity
of our country is manufacture, which, as now
carried on, is destructive of the health, morals,
and social comfort of the mass of people en-
gaged in it. It is only since the introduction
of the cotton trade that children, at an age
before they have acquired strength or mental
instruction, have been forced into the cotton
mills — those receptacles, in too many in-
stances, for living, human skeletons, almost
disrobed of intellect, where, as the business
is often now conducted, they linger out ^
few years of miserable existence, acquiring
every bad habit which they may disseminate
throughout society. It is only since the in-
troduction of this trade that children and
even grown people were required to labor
more than twelve hours in a day, not includ-
ing the time allotted for meals. It is only
since the introduction of this trade that the
sole recreation of the laborer is to be found
in the pothouse or ginshop, it is only since
the introduction of this baneful trade that
poverty, crime, and misery have made rapid
and fearful strides throughout the community.
156 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
"Shall we then go unblushingly, and ask the
legislators of our country to pass legislative
acts to sanction and increase this trade — to
sign the death warrants of the strength, mo-
rals, and happiness of our fellow-creatures,
and not attempt to propose corrections for
the evils which it creates? Tf such be your
determination, I, for one, will not join in the
application — no, I will, with all the faculties
I possess, oppose every attempt made to ex-
tend the trade that, except in name, is more
injurious to those employed in it than is the
slavery of the poor negroes in the West In-
dies, for deeply as I am interested in the cot-
ton manufacture, highly as I value the ex-
tended political power of my country, yet
knowing as I do, from long experience both
here and in England, the miseries which this
trade, as it is now conducted, inflicts on those
to whom it gives employment, I do not hesi-
tate to say: Perish the cotton trade, perish
even the political superiority of our country,
if it depends on the cotton trade, rather than
that they shall be upheld by the sacrifice of
everything valuable in life."
Compare these noble utterances of the great-
souled Utopian Socialist with the sneers at
the most unfortunate element of the working
class which disfigure the pages of "The Man
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM i;)?
Versus the State" and let the Individualist
take whatever satisfaction he can get from
the contrast.
But Spencer's reactionary views did not
stop with opposition to every attempt to al-
leviate the condition of the wealth producers
of his day.
As an individualist, he would tolerate no
''government interference" with the rights of
individuals who wished to shoot sea-birds
which they could not get, but which usually
flew out to sea, and died floating, with a
broken wing. Why should these lofty minded
people be interfered with? Were they not the
prototypes of our own Roosevelt, who is al-
ways ready to manifest his love of nature by
killing everything in sight?
What a pity these individualists were not
allowed to have the British telegraph system
managed by a gang of financial pirates like
the owners of the "Western Union" and the
"Postal" of this country.
State repression of knowledge having
proved such a bad thing in the middle ages,
state encouragement of learning must of
course, needs be equally bad in the nineteenth
century. "Government endowment of re-
search," indeed! Not for the individualist
champion. And yet England holds the world's
158 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
honors in biology, because oi Darwin, whose
Opportunity came through the government
exploration of "The Beagle,'' and Huxley, who
began his brilliant career with the govern-
ment expedition of the "Rattlesnake." As
England led the world in the middle of the
century so France had held first place during
its first quarter, and that because the French
government sent out scientific expeditions to
the tropics, which, on their return loaded
down the shelves of the "Jardin des Plantes"
with specimens which made possible those
greatest of her thinkers, Lamarck, Cuvier and
Geoffrey St. Hilaire.
When the feeding of school children is
thrown as a charge against Socialism, we are
proud to plead guilty. It is our glory that
the only cities in the world that have no starv-
ing children behind school benches are those
cities such as Lille, Ivry, Montlucon, etc.
with a Socialist majority in the town coun-
cils, which removed the disgrace.
Such then were the arguments of this flag
bearer of Individualism, who has supplied the
opponents of Socialism with objections these
thirty years. His individualist philosophy is
now so thoroughly discredited as to call for
no answer were it not for the fact pointed out
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM I59
by Huxley, that erroneous ideas do not die
just simply because they have been killed.
It is not necessary to v/heel into position
the heavy artillery of Marx to overthrow this
house of cards. Spencer is a sufficient reply
to Spencer.
Here is the great contradiction. Spencer,
the great biologist, says the brain is to the
animal what the Government is to a society,
(i) The more effective^ and completely the
brain controls the members composing the
animal body, the higher its place in the or-
ganic scale. (2) The less effectively and com-
pletely the Government controls the members
of the body politic the better will be the so-
ciety.
Sociological literature has failed to produce
any individualist champion able to reconcile
this astonishing contradiction. And so there
it stands plainly before the eyes of Mr. Spen-
cer's readers.
"Suppose," says Professor Huxley, "that, in
accordance with this view, each muscle were
to maintain that the nervous system had no
right to interfere with its contraction except
to prevent it from hindering the contraction
of another muscle; or each gland, that it had
a right to secrete, so long as its secretion in-
terfered with no other; suppose every separate
160 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
cell were left free to follow its own "interest"
and laissez-faire lord of all, v/hat would come
of the body physiological? The fact is that
the sovereign power of the body thinks for the
physiological organism, acts for it, and rules
the individual components with a rod of iron.
Even the blood corpuscles can't hold a public
meeting without being accused of "conges-
tion" — and the brain, like other despots
whom we have known, calls out at once for
the use of sharp steel against them."
This is the rock upon which Spencerian In-
dividualism struck and went to pieces, inde-
pendently of those great forces, which I shall
point out, that made for its disintegration.
These two contradictory positions are the
upper and nether millstones between which
the individualistic philosophy of Anarchism is
ground to powder. Socialists are not stupid
enough to argue that because society can get
along without a king therefore an orchestra
should have "no Head." We are also able to
distinguish between "the state" which Social-
ism will abolish, and the "administration of
industry" which it will establish.
Every step forward in modern thought has
emphasized the importance of that factor
called "environment." The evolution philoso-
phy is an environment philosophy. Lamarck,
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 1^1
the greatest pioneer of modern science, makes
a change of environment the prime necessity
of organic development. Darwin makes en-
vironment the selective factor in "Natural Se-
lection" and in this he is supported by every
living biologist of note. Karl Marx paralleled
these great advances by discovering that every
political philosophy takes its origin in some
particular economic environment. This is true
of Socialism and Individualism alike.
And so if we wish to understand the his-
toric significance of Individualism we must go
back to the period of its birth and examine the
social processes of production of that day.
This takes us back to the early years of the
19th century.
In the closing half of the l8th century, la-
borers individually owned the small and crude
tools by which they made their living. In this
stage of social development the laborer own-
ing the tools he used, appropriated the result.
There was here no contradiction and what-
ever notion of justice is supposed to inhere in
the "individual ownership of the means of pro-
duction" derives its whole force from the eco-
nomic status of the worker of this period. If
that status had remained unchanged. Social-
ism would never have been heard of. But in
the process of evolution the truth and justice
162 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
of the i8th century became a lie and a social
wrong in the 19th.
This transformation was wrought by the
development of machinery. It was impossible
for every individual worker to own a large
machine, and so some men became toolless
wage laborers employed by the owners of ma-
chinery. This is the beginning of the present
labor problem and here arises the struggle in
the world of ideas between the philosophy of
Individualism and that of Socialism.
Let us examine the vital change which had
taken place even before we reach the middle
of the last century. Now, one man uses the
tools, but another owns them and appropri-
ates the result. And this is the economic
foundation of the class war between the ex-
ploited wage worker and the exploiting capi-
talist.
But the individualist theories proper to the
i8th century, and its mode of wealth produc-
tion, passed over into the 19th where their
economic justification had ceased. As the for-
tunate individual owners of machinery found
themselves growing rich at a great rate apart
from their own individual efforts, they became
enthusiastic supporters of "Individualism" and
eventually founded the "Manchester'' school
of politics, which had Herbert Spencer as its
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 163
chief mouth-piece and Henry George as a
somewhat belated trumpeter.
In this heyday of Individualism the "rate
of profit" was at its highest, one Lancashire
cotton spinner boasting of one thousand per
cent. But the social hell in which the English
working class of this period lived is without
parallel in modern times. Its system of child
labor, as recorded in the government blue
books as well as already shown by Owen,
was indescribably horrible, but the manufac-
turers were opposed to "government interfer-
ence'' and the individualist philosophy and its
bogey of "paternalism" was their craven plea.
With the grouping of the workers in fac-
tories production became socialized, and now
came this contradiction, production was so-
cial while ownership and appropriation were
individual. The Socialists of that period right-
ly maintained that society should either go
back in production to the individual form so
as to be in harmony with the existing indi-
vidual form of ownership and appropriation,
or it should adopt social ownership and social
appropriation to harmonize with the already
existing social production.
But the wheel of history never revolves
backward, and the latter solution is destined
ultimately to prevail. Social evolution has al-
164 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
ready carried us far in that direction. With
the organization of capital individual owner-
ship disappeared and class ownership has
taken its place. The struggle of the 20th
century is not a struggle between individu-
als, it is a struggle between classes, and so
Individualism has lost its meaning — it is
defunct.
With the disappearance of the economic
foundation of Individualism, and the over-
throw of the philosophic superstructure erected
thereon, all its watchwords have lost their
power to charm. Free trade, free labor, free
contract, free competition; all these are the
lingering and belated echoes of a day that is
gone.
"Free trade" was the protest of the rising
capitalist class against the trammels placed
upon its commerce by the feudal regime.
Now it appears in a new role; it is the cry
of the small capitalist against those "predatory
trusts" which discovered that competition is
not the life but the death of trade, and are
using protection to destroy their weaker fel-
low-robbers.
"Free labor" was the demand of the capi-
talist that the serf should be released from
the soil in the country so that he might be
available for exploitation in the factory, in
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 165
the City. In England an attempt has been
made to give this defunct phrase a new lease
of life by the "Free Labor Association" an
organization which had this in common with
our "Citizen's Alliance" that it sought to en-
courage the dear good workingman to keep
out of the "tyrannical" labor unions.
"Freedom of contract" or, as it is sometimes
called "Voluntary Co-operation" never ex-
isted in capitalist society and has never been
anything but a grim joke or a plain lie. Where
is the freedom or voluntaryism of the worker
who must work for what he can get or starve
like a dog in the street?
The effects of "free Competition" in Eng-
land in the early days of capitalism, where it
was most free^ were such that none but a
fiend would wish them recalled. The "might
have been" halo with which present day in-
dividualists seek to surround this principle, is
a midsummer night's dream that never had
any existence in the world of reality and can
never be realized, except in the phantasmo-
goria of their own ideological imaginations.
Individualism in all its forms has become
an anachronism. The deified ego of Max Stir-
ner, which imagines itself sitting enthroned
on the pinnacle of the universe, directing the
motions of the planet Jupiter by crooking its
166 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
little finger, is an ideological phantasm, whicK
has no connection with the solid earth. The
flowery exhortations of Emerson, to live a
noble life in ignoble surroundings, is an invi-
tation to attempt what is, for the mass, im-
possible. Any philosophy which proposes to
save the individual without transforming his
social environment stands condemned by mod-
ern science.
If, with a society more highly organized
than any known to history, we still have anar-
chy in the production and distribution of our
wealth, the remedy is, not less social organi-
zation, but more. If with all our dental science
toothache still exists, the cure is not fewer
dentists, but more dentistry. The need of to-
day is not less society, but more social organi-
zation. There is no hope in going back to the
small production of sixty years ago as Hearst
and Bryan desire. Increasing the number of
bandits in any society is not the concern of
their victims. The golden age of labor is not
in the past but in the future. The labor prob-
lem cannot be solved by going back to the
scramble of the hog-pen or the methods of
the jungle. There is no succour in flying at
each other's throats in the name of business,
Freedom cannot live in a society rent by
class wars. Her conquests are only possible
SPENCER'S INDIVIDUALISM 157
With a humanity united to subdue the cosmic
world by which it is interprenetrated and sur-
rounded.
Happily for us, society evolves independ-
ently of anybody's opiniqn. Our opinions fol-
low blindly and gropingly in the rear. The
opinions of individualists do not manufacture
social laws, according to certain ethical re-
quirements; they interpret and explain those
laws which they discover in operation. The
fundamental question is not, "is Individualism
better than Socialism?" but "Is society mov-
ing in the direction of the one or the other?''
To answer this question it is only necessary
to compare the world of to-day with that of
ten or even five years ago. America moves
steadily toward Socialism, while Europe ad-
vances in great leaps. Every civilized country
tells the same story, and the recent develop-
ment of Finland and Austria astonished the
world.
Society moves forward, as irresistibly as
the ocean tides, and it moves in a direction
predicted by those greatest thinkers of this
or any age — the men who linked their lives
with the blood and the tears and the struggles
of half a century in the greatest cause that
ever throbbed in the brain of man — the cause
of Socialism.
X.
CIVILIZATION-
WARD AND DIETZGEN
One of the darkest curses that has fallen
on the working class is its being shut out of
the wondrous world of modern thought. The
great gates of the Temple of Science are
clanged in its face, and its mind is fed on the
theological garbage of the Middle Ages. In
the school, the press, and especially the pul-
pit, ideas are gravely presented as serious
truths, which are known by all university men
to be thoroughly exploded lies.
A twentieth century newspaper will braz-
enly devote a whole page to presenting, with
pictorial illustrations, alleged recently discov-
ered proofs of the truth of that Genesis legend
which has done such loyal service to the rul-
ing class by stultifying the brains of its vic-
tims. These hypocritical displays are never
publicly contradicted, although every man
with the least smattering of scientific knowl-
edge, including the editors, knows how utterly
false they are. These worthies indulge in a
168
CrVILIZATION-WARD AND DIETZGEN 169
sly grin and lower one eyelid, for it is gen-
erally understood among them that the great
donkey — the working class — will only con-
sent to carry everybody's burdens in addition
to its own, just so long as it is kept in child-
ish ignorance of everything it ought to know.
And this is not all. Now that a great body
of workingmen are discarding these ancient
lies, and groping for those great truths that
contain the germs of their redemption, the of-
ficial savants, true servants of the ruling class,
twist and warp their own science in order to
make it contradict every working class idea.
This attitude of the time serving intellect-
ual lackeys of the professorial chairs has
brought with it another blighting curse — it
has made a considerable number of working
men suspicious of modern science itself. It is
an old-time tragedy, this breaking with one's
best friend because of the groundless calumn-
ies of an interested enemy.
This terribly mistaken antagonism to sci-
ence has unfortunately found its way, in some
measure, into the Socialist movement, though
happily, increasing acquaintance with Social-
ism's classic literature is breaking it down.
In this connection the following passage from
the pen of Isador Ladoff is very pertinent:
^'Rationalistic modern Socialism is based,
170 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
not exclusively on certain economic theories
and maxims, as some narrow-minded 'Social-
ists pure and simple' think and would fain
make us believe^ but on the broad foundation
of modern science and thought. The economic
theories peculiar to modern Socialism are de-
rived from the application of the results of the
achievements of modern knowledge and phi-
losophy to the field of social economics. The
trouble with the 'Socialists pure and simple'
IS in the extreme limitation of their mental
horizon. They happen to know, or rather
imagine they have mastered Marxian econom-
ics, while modern science and philosophy re-
mains to them a sealed letter. That is why
they get irritated whenever and wherever they
meet in the socialistic press an article con-
taining something else than the everlasting
parrot-like repetitions of pseudo-socialistic
commonplaces and shibboleths. Every attempt
to present to the attention of the readers of
socialistic publications, glimpses of the radi-
ant world of science and philosophy, leading
up to socialistic ideas and ideals in all their
world-redeeming significance, appears to the
simpleminded and superstitious simon-pure
Socialists as an attack on somebody or some-
thing, as a heresy and heterodoxy of some
kind. To such people the religion of science
CIVILIZATION— WARD AND DIETZGEN 171
is the religion of ignorance and vice versa,
ignorance is their religion and science."
The use of science and philosophy by the
ruling class as a pretence for the appropria-
tion of the lion's share of the wealth produced
by labor does not prove that workingmen
should abandon philosophy as useless to their
cause. On the contrary, as Dietzgen says:
''Philosophy is a subject which closely con-
cerns the working class," and he adds : "This,
of course, does by no means imply that every
workingman should try to become acquainted
with philosophy and study the relation be-
tween the idea and matter. From the fact
that we all eat bread does not follow that we
must all understand milling and baking. But
just as we need millers and bakers, so does
the working class stand in need of keen schol-
ars who can follow up the tortuous ways of
the false priests and lay bare the inanity of
their tricks."
It is quite clear that working men, instead
of underestimating the value of mental train-
ing, should remember what a terrible weapon
it has proved in the hands of their enemies.
It is precisely because the workers have lack-
ed this weapon, that in spite of their over-
whelming numbers and physical strength,
they have always been outwitted. "The eman-
172 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
cipation of the working classes/' concludes
Dietzgen, "requires that they should lay hold
on the science of the century.''
Lester F. Ward, whose theories we shall
now examine, warns us against the erroneous
supposition "formerly quite prevalent," that
"science consists in the discovery of facts."
He maintains that "there is not a single sci-
ence of which this is true, and a much more
nearly correct definition would be that science
consists in reasoning about facts."
We may recall here that learned body which
sneered at Darwin as "a mere theorizer" and
conferred its honors upon an unknown man
who had collected some facts about butter-
flies but had carefully avoided "reasoning
about them." Of course the value of this rea-
soning is that it leads to the discovery of those
laws or generalizations which reveal the rela-
tion of the facts to each other, and thus en-
ables us to appreciate their real significance.
Therefore we might venture to push the
matter a little further and define science as
the discovery of laws. But for the uniformity
and invariability of physical phenomena, as-
tronomy would be impossible. The discovery
of evolution laid the foundations of modern
biology. Dalton's theory of atoms and Lavoi-
sier's permanence of matter emancipated
CIVILIZATION-WARD AND DIBTZGEN I73
chemistry from the superstitions of alchemy.
Ward is therefore on soHd ground when he
maintains that "the indispensable foundation
of all economic and social science" consists
in the fact that "all human activities and all
social phenomena are rigidly subject to nat-
ural law." It is just the difficulty of discern-
ing uniform laws amidst the highly complex
phenomena of society that delays the proper
development of sociology, although, as we
have seen, this difficulty is materially aug-
mented by the class interests at stake.
Again, just as biology was hindered in its
growth by the doctrine of special creations
and, still earlier, Copernican astronomy was
checked by the geocentric theory, so now the
progress of sociology is restrained by the doc-
trine of divine providence. Believers in divine
providence are well represented by the Hin-
doo who in his lesson on English composition
spoke of his father as having "died according
to the caprice of God which passeth all under-
standing."
It is precisely because "caprice" can not be
understood and cannot therefore, be made the
basis of prevision, that it can not be admitted
into the domam of science. Science, as Star-
cke well said, is founded on "faith in the uni-
versality of causation." If the activities of men
174 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
and the policies of nations are not ruled by
cause and effect a science of society is im-
possible.
And yet, contends Ward, it was the very
adoption of this "altogether sound abstract
principle" that "led to the greatest and most
fundamental of all economic errors, an error
which has found its way into the heart of
modern scientific philosophy, widely influenc-
ing public opinion, and offering a stubborn
resistance to all efforts to dislodge it/'
And now we come to the keynote of Ward's
whole system and at the same time to the
point where he completely breaks with the
biological sociologists. The error, which Ward
attributes to them all^ the refutation of which
is the main object of his work, is described
as follows:
"This error consists in practically ignoring
the existence of a rational faculty in man,
which, while it does not render his actions
any less subject to natural laws, so enorm-
ously complicates them that they can no
longer be brought within the simple formulas
that suffice in the calculus of mere animal mo-
tives. This element creeps stealthily in be-
tween the child and the adult, and all un-
noticed puts the best laid schemes of econom-
ists and philosophers altogether aglee. A great
CIVILIZATION-WARD AND DIETZGEN 175
psychic factor has been left out of the ac-
count, the intellectual or rational factor, and
this factor is so stupendous that there is no
room for astonishment in contemplating the
magnitude of the error which its omission has
caused."
This is the foundation stone of Ward's so-
ciology. With great care he elaborates the
vital difference between the economy of na-
ture with its blind forces, and the economy of
society with its mental arrangement of means
to ends. He marshals that well-known array
of facts which prove the tremendous waste
continually going on in the natural world.
According to M. Quatrefages, two succes-
sive generations of a single plant-louse would
cover eight acres. A large chestnut tree in
June contains as much as a ton of pollen.
Considering the size of pollen-grain the num-
ber on such a tree would be next to incon-
ceivable. Burst a puff-ball and there arises
from it a cloud that fills the air for some dis-
tance around. This cloud consists of an al-
most infinite number of exceedingly minute
spores, each of which should it by the rarest
chance fall upon a favorable spot, is capable
of reproducing the fungus to which it belongs.
And yet in spite of all this enormous repro-
ductivity the population of these species re-
176 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
mains practically stationary. Ward objects
very strongly to this insane waste of nature
being set up as a model for human society,,
and he is entitled to the sympathy of Social-
ists who have always protested against the
planless anarchy of capitalist production,
which however, bad as it is, can hardly be
considered a circumstance compared with the
random waste of nature.
"The waste of being," says Asa Gray, "is
enormous, far beyond the common apprehen-
sion. Seeds, eggs, and other germs, are de-
signed to be plants and animals, but not one
of a thousand or a million achieves its de-
stiny." And Gray quotes with approval from
an article in the Westminster Review : "When
we find that the sowing is a scattering at
random, and that for one being provided for
and living, ten thousand perish unprovided
for, we must allow that the existing order
would be considered the worst disorder in any
human sphere of action,"
Ward, of course, takes the same view: "No
one will object to having nature's methods
fully explained and exposed, and thoroughly
taught as a great truth of science. It is only
when it is held up as a model to be followed
by man and all are forbidden to 'meddle' with
its operations that it becomes necessary to
CIVILIZATION-WARD AND DIETZGEN 177
protest. I shall endeavor still further to show
that it is wholly at variance with anything
that a rational being would ever conceive of,
and that if a being supposed to be rational
were to adopt it he would be looked upon as
insane."
"Such," says Ward, "is nature's economy.
How different the economy of a rational be-
ing! He prepares the ground, clearing it of
its vegetable competitors, then he carefully
plants the seeds at the proper intervals so that
they shall not crowd one another, and after
they have sprouted he keeps off their enemies
whether vegetable or animal, supplies water if
needed, even supplies the lack of chemical con-
stituents of the soil, if he knows what they
are, and thus secures, as nearly as possible,
the vigorous growth and fruition of every seed
planted. This is the economy of mind."
And now Ward presents a truth that is very
familiar to all Socialists — that the difference
between an animal living in a state of nature
and man living in human society, is that man
is a tool using animal. This use and develop-
ment of tools is due to that application of
reason called the inventive faculty, which no
other animal possesses. "The beaver indeed,
builds dams by felling trees, but its tools are
its teeth, and no further advantage is taken
178 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
than that which results from the way the mus-
cles are attached to its jaws. The warfare
of animals is waged literally with tooth and
nail, with horn and hoof, with claw and spur,
with tusk and trunk, with fang and sting^ —
always with organic, never with mechanical
weapons."
And because man can invent tools and im-
prove them he has an immense advantage over
other animals. It is this advantage which the
biological sociologists have overlooked. But
this advantage makes an incalculable differ-
ence. The fundamental difference is, that "the
environment transforms the animal, while man
transforms the environment.''
What, then, is civilization? It is human
development beyond the animal stage. What
it its chief factor? It is psychic — the appli-
cation of "mind'' to the problems of life.
Now we see still further how Ward is ir-
resistibly driven, by the logic of his position,
to Socialist conclusions. He sees that another
striking difference between irrational nature
and rational society is that nature is compe-
titive, while society is increasingly co-opera-
tive. And this co-operation is due to the
greater development of that psychic factor,
which is the chief instrument of civilization
and leads men to avoid waste.
ClYtLIZATION-WARD AND DIETZGEN 179
Turning now to "Pure Sociology," we are
told that the subject-matter of sociology is
"human achievement." When we ask, in what
does this achievement consist, we are inform-
ed that: "Achievement does not consist in
wealth. Wealth is fleeting and ephemeral.
Achievement is permanent and eternal."
Again the sum total of the things which
constitute achievement may be summed up in
the one word "inventions."
Achievement with Ward is another name
for civilization. Page after page is given to
an enumeration of its particulars, — music,
painting, poetry, exploration, industry and
many other things which we have not space
even to mention. The one thing that is vital
here is that "achievement," while it does not
include perishable wealth, nor yet the actual,
perishable machinery by which the wealth has
been produced, does nevertheless undoubtedly
include that something described by Social-
ists as the "process of production."
This is of prime importance because now
when we turn to Ward's "Applied Sociology,"
we find that not only achievement, but "im-
provement" is the theme of that branch of the
science.
And now listen to this great American so-
ciologist, who has so far outstripped all his
180 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
contemporaries as to be practically without a
rival, this thinker whose monumental works
have gained him an international reputation;
listen and compare what follows with the
hocus-pocus that usually comes from the of-
ficial chairs:
"The purpose of applied sociology is to
harmonize achievement with improvement.
If all this achievement which constitutes civil-
ization has really been wrought without
producing any improvement in the condition
of the human race, it is time that the reason
for this was investigated. Applied sociology
includes among its main purposes the investi-
gation of this question. The difficulty lies in
the fact that achievement is not socialized.
The problem, therefore, is that of the sociali-
zation of achievement.
"We are told that no scheme for the equali-
zation of men can succeed; that at first it was
physical strength that determined the inequal-
ities; that this at length gave way to the
power of cunning, and that still later it be-
came intelligence in general that determined
the place of individuals in society. This last,
it is maintained is now, in the long run, in the
most civilized races and the most enlightened
communities, the true reason why some oc-
cupy lower and others higher positions in the
CiVILIZATION—WARD AND DIETZGEN 181
natural strata of society. This, it is said, is
the natural state and is as it should be. It is
moreover affirmed that being natural there is
no possibility of altering it.
"Of course all this falls to the ground on
the least analysis. For example, starting
from the standpoint of achievement, it would
naturally be held that there would be great
injustice in robbing those who by their super-
ior wisdom had achieved the great results
upon which civilization rests and distributing
the natural rewards among inferior persons
who had achieved nothing. All would assent
to this. And yet this is in fact practically what
has been done. The whole history of the world
shows that those who have achieved have
received no reward. The rewards for their
achievement have fallen to persons who have
achieved nothing. They have simply for the
most part profited by some accident of posi-
tion in a complex, badly organized society,
whereby they have been permitted to claim
and appropriate the fruits of the achievements
of others. But no one would insist that these
fruits should all go to those who had made
them possible. The fruits of achievement are
incalculable in amount and endure forever.
Their authors are few in number and soon
pass away. They would be the last to claim
182 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
an undue share. They work for all mankind
and for all time, and all they ask is that all
mankind shall forever benefit by their work."
And so Ward's conclusion is that the great-
ness of the present consists in that mass of
achievements called civilization, among which
are those inventions which have so wonder-
fully increased the capacity of social labor in
its production of wealth. And the hope of the
future lies in the socialization of those achieve-
ments so as to make their rich fruits the com-
mon heritage of all mankind. There are no
Socialists who will quarrel with these conclu-
sions.
We will now briefly compare this position
with that of the great German thinker, Joseph
Dietzgen, who at the international congress
at The Hague, in 1872, was introduced by
Karl Marx to the assembled delegates with
these words: "Here is our philosopher/' Of
course we shall only deal with his theories
here as they relate to the conclusions reached
by Ward.
"All exertion and struggle in human his-
tory" says Dietzgen, "all aspirations and re-
searches of science find their common aim in
the freedom of man, in the subjection of na-
ture to the sway of his mind."
This is, as we have seen, precisely Ward's
CIVILIZATION-WARD AND DIETZGEN 183
idea of what constitutes the substance of civil-
ization.
"Man, to be sure/' says Dietzgen, "is still
dependent on nature. Her tribulations are not
yet all overcome. Culture has yet a good deal
to do; aye, its work is endless. But we have
so far mastered the dragon, that we finally
succeeded in forging the weapon with which
it can be subdued; we know the way to tame
the beast into a useful domestic animal.''
What is this "weapon" which humanity has
forged and which constitutes the possibility
of its salvation? "This salvation," says Dietz-
gen, "was neither invented nor revealed, it has
grown of the accumulated labor of history.
It consists in the wealth of to-day which arose
glorious and dazzling in the light of science,
out of human flesh and blood, to save human-
ity. This wealth in all its palpable reality, is
the solid foundation of the hope of social-
democracy."
And here lest there should seem to be a
plain contradiction between Dietzgen and
Ward, we will go further and see that Dietz-
gen, like Ward, does not mean merely those
items of wealth which happen to be in exist-
ence in the shape of tangible commodities.
"The wealth of to-day does not consist In
the superb mansions, inhabited by the privi-
184 EVOLUTION. SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
leged of society, nor does it consist in their
costly apparel, or in the gold and precious
stones of their jewelry, or in the heaps of
goods peeping through the show windows of
our great cities. All that as well as the coin
and bullion in the trunks and safes form but
an appendix or, so to speak, the tassels and
tufts, behind which is concealed that great and
real wealth — the rock on which our hope is
built.
"What authorizes the people to believe in
the salvation from long ages of torture — nay,
not only to believe in, but to see it, and act-
ively strive for, is the fairy-like productive
power, the prodigious fertility of human la-
bor. In the secrets which have been wrung
from nature; in the magic formulas by which
we force her to do our wishes and to yield
her bounties almost without any painful work
ort our part; in the constantly increasing im-
provement of the methods of production —
in this I say consists the wealth which can
accomplish what no redeemer ever could."
And Dietzgen, like Ward, protests against
this great legacy of history, this vast accumu-
lation of the results of the combined social
labor of a hundred generations, being the sole
property of those "who never achieved any-
thing!"
CIVILIZATION— WARD AND DIETZGEN 185
Dietzgen, like Ward, sees that the great
problem which confronts the race is to break
down those intolerable bars which prevent
humanity from entering into its just inherit-
ance.
To this great and culminating task man
must bend all the powers of his mind. Now
he has reached the point where the gates of
liberty begin to yield and with one grand,
united effort may be thrown wide open so
that all the sons and daughters of men may
finish the long centuries of misery and freely
enter in.
To continue this senseless oppression longer
would be the summit of stupidity.
"Consider the frugal needs of our people
and at the same time the fertility of labor,
and ask yourselves if mere instinct alone
would not be sufficient to teach us how to
supply adequately our needs with the help of
the existing means of production?"
To make these "means of production the
property of society" is then the problem of
Ward's applied sociology and Dietzgen's so-
cial democracy alike. According to both, this
emancipation of the mass of the people from
the last form of slavery is the one consuming
task of civilization.
And the psychic factor, the consciously rea-
186 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC
soning brain of man is, according to both, to
be more than ever the instrument of ''achieve-
ment."
To Dietzgen especially, the time is rotten-
ripe for the great change.
"The salvation of humanity is involved in
this question. It is so great and sublime that
all other problems which time may bear in
its folds must wait in silence. The whole of
old Europe is waiting with bated breath the
fulfilling of the things which are coming.
"Oh, ye short-sighted and narrow-minded,
who can not give up the fad of moderate, slow,
organic progress ! Do you not perceive that all
your great liberal passions sink to the level
of mere trifling, because the great question of
social salvation is on the order of the day?
The calm precedes the tempest. History
stands still, because she gathers force for a
great catastrophe."
THE LEWIS LECTURES.
This book, Evolution, Social and Organic,
is the first volume of a series of lectures to
which we expect to make notable additions in
the future. We can at this time definitely
promise two volumes, which will be made up
from the lectures delivered by Mr. Lewis at the
Garrick Theater during the winter and spring
of 1908.
Ten Blind Leaders of the Blind. This will
in all probability be the second volume of the
Lewis Lectures, and we expect to publish it in
May or June. It will consist of critical studies
of the theories of such reformers, philosophers
and moralists as Benjamin Kidd, Henry
George, Dr. Schaeffle, Thomas Carlyle, Au-
guste Comte and Immanuel Kant.
It must not be imagined that Mr. Lewis in
these lectures is merely attempting to refute
these thinkers, nor that he would disparage the
service that each in his time has rendered. On
the contrary his aim is to give the reader as
clear a comprehension as possible of what each
of these men has achieved. And he further-
more shows how the outlook of each was
limited by the economic environment from
which flowed the mental atmosphere in which
2 THE LEWIS LECTURES
he lived, so that it would have been unreason-
able for us to expect from these writers any
other conclusions than those at which they
actually arrived. Understanding these condi-
tions we can better understand how to meet
the arguments of those still influenced by the
outgrown ideas which are perhaps best stated
in the writings of the leaders here considered.
Socialism and Modem Thought. This is
planned for the third volume of the series, and
will probably be ready in the summer or fall of
1908. It will be a direct supplement to this
present volume, Evolution, Social and Organic,
which explains the scientific basis on which
socialism rests. The second volume, as we
have shown, is taken up with an examination
of rival theories. The third volume will restate
the principles of socialism and show how they
are applied to the pressing problems of today.
A lecture on "The Economic Interpretation of
History" will show how Marx's historical
method throws a search-light on the darkest
places in which sociological students have
hitherto groped. One on "The Positive School
of Criminology" will tell how the socialist
scholars of Italy have revolutionized the once
hopeless science of crimes and punishments,
tHE LEWIS LECTURES O
and have established certain very definite and
very fruitful propositions, showing all the
while that crime must last while capitalism
lasts. In "The Latest Word of Science and
Philosophy — Monism/' Mr. Lewis will show
how the clearest thinkers in the modern social-
ist movement have arrived at a conception of
the universe that is broad enough to take in all
reality, and to show the relation of the facts
of mind to the facts of matter. We have room
to mention here but one more lecture, and
that shall be "The Inevitability of the Triumph
of Socialism."
Each of these volumes will be uniform with
the present one; advance orders are solicited.
The price, postage included, will be fifty cents
each.
The Art of Lecturing. Mr. Lewis had per-
sistently been urged to teach a class in the art
of lecturing, but the many demands on his time
made this quite out of the question, and as the
best way to satisfy his friends, he wrote a series
of brief articles for the Chicago Daily Socialist,
each article containing some practical sugges-
tions for young socialist speakers, each sug-
gestion the direct fruit of the author's personal
experience. These articles at once attracted
4 THE LEWIS LECTURES
wide attention, and long before they had all
appeared, there was an unmistakable demand
for their publication in book form. That is
why this book is issued. There is nothing else
quite so helpful for the young man or woman
who expects to lecture on the socialist platform.
And many others who have no thought of lec-
turing will enjoy reading the book, because it
brings the reader into such close touch with the
personality of a man worth knowing. Paper,
25c, postpaid.
The Standard Socialist Series. This volume
is a fair sample of the twenty-five socialist
books already published in this library. In
their selection, the object of the publishers has
been in so far as possible to include all the
greatest works by European and American
socialists that could possibly be brought within
the limits of a fifty-cent volume. Of course the
series includes the Communist Manifesto, by
Marx and Engels. This, by the way, is pub-
lished in two editions, in one of which is also
printed Liebknecht's work on socialist tactics
entitled No Compromise, while the other in-
cludes a version of the Manifesto in Esperanto,
the new international language, as well as the
English version. The Standard Socialist Series
THE LEWIS LECTURES 6
also includes Marx's Revolution and Counter-
Revolution, and three of the most important
works of Frederick Engels, Socialism, Utopian
and Scientific, The Origin of the Family, Pri-
vate Property and the State, and Feuerbach:
The Roots of the Socialist Philosophy. As for
living socialist writers, France is represented
in this library by Lafargue's Social and Philo-
sophical Studies and The Right to Be Lazy and
Other Studies, Germany by Kautsky's The So-
cial Revolution and Ethics and the Materialist
Conception of History, Italy by Ferri's The
Positive School of Criminology, Russia by Ple-
chanoff's Anarchism and Socialism, Belgium by
Vandervelde's Collectivism and Industrial Evo-
lution, England by Blatchford's Britain for the
British, and America by the writings of Isador
Ladoflf, Roberts Rives LaMonte, A. M. Simons,
John Spargo, Ernest Untermann, John M.
Work and others. Full descriptions of all these
books, together with an account of our other
books at higher and lower prices and sugges-
tions as to the choice of books, together with
some interesting propaganda matter, will be
found in the current issue of the Socialist Book
Bulletin, mailed free to any one requesting it.
How to Get Books at Cost. This Bulletin
6 THE LEWIS LECTURES
also explains our co-operative plan for supply-
ing books at cost. The publishing house which
issues this volume is not owned by any capi-
talist. It is owned by 1,900 socialist working
people, each of whom has subscribed ten dol-
lars to help publish more socialist books. No
dividends are paid ; the advantage to the stock-
holder is that instead of paying fifty cents for
a book like this one he pays twenty-five cents
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it is mailed to him. More stockholders are
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