doctrine of development, a doctrine grounded on observation, into a fiction of the imagination, for we have to do, not with Socialist Democracy as such, but with its relation to Darwinism.
The result of our investigation is, that Socialist Democracy, wherever it appeals to Darwinism, has failed to understand that hypothesis; that, if it has understood it, it knows not how to draw from it any advantage for itself; and that it must deny the unalterable principle of Darwinism, namely, competition.[1]
Such is an account of our relations to Socialist Democracy, a movement whose gravity we look on as a sign of a diseased social state that calls for help and salvation.
It remains to define our position with respect to the views of a few of the friends and counselors of the Socialistic movement who, approaching more nearly to the Darwinian point of view, look for the best results for human progress to result from natural selection after present social ills have been cured. I refer in particular to Albert Lange. That so eminent a student of human life should estimate at its true value the struggle for existence which has come down to humanity from the unconscious animal world, was to have been expected. He well knew how little warrant there is for the expectation that the "struggle for the more desirable position" will ever cease. But he based his hope on the idea of liberty and equality, an idea that is slowly developed with the developing reason, and which brings men together, in spite of differences of race, or talents, or station. He hoped that the laws of the conscious intelligence would, as time went on, gain the mastery. He hoped for a deliverance to come in the very remote future from a current of thought and feeling which would arise in the developed human mind, and which would run counter to the natural process of differentiation and division. He hoped for a spiritualization of the physical struggle into a peaceful contest, having for its object the good of the race. It is therefore nothing new if in these days like views are put forth by Socialist Democrats.
In his work "The Labor Question," Lange has intimated that certain social evils are the results of artificial selection, and that these might be corrected by a return to simpler natural conditions. If we were to spin out this thought, as is done, for instance, by Dodel in his "Neuere Schöpfungsgeschichte" (1875, pages 145, 147), we might readily persuade ourselves that under the social conditions now existing the principle of natural selection, indeed any purely natural development, "comes into operation either not at all, or only to a limited extent." Then it seems to be an infraction of the natural order, that they who are born to station, so often, without personal worth or talents, monopolize, in virtue of their inherited wealth, the pleasures and enjoyments of life, leaving for their descendants the same even path.
- ↑ In the "Zukunft" (1878, ubi supra) the competition of the future is narrowed down to "a competitive struggle between natural gifts."
