Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/82

70 following John Stuart Mill and the rococo political economists, discourse concerning the eternal divisibility of Capital and Labour, they talk as Cuvier did of the eternal immutability of species. One shrugs one's shoulders, and discusses something else. Is this what you mean by the scientific basis of Socialism?'

'Yes, though I should not put it quite in that way.'

'And you no longer cherish that amazing blunder of those from whom we should least expect it; of those who gravely assure us that civilisation does not, by the mere legal inheritance of wealth, paralyse the great law of natural and sexual selection. This was an obvious fact to the slow and sure biological intelligence of Darwin. The non-appreciation of it seems to me an amazing stultification in some of his fellows, who are indisputably dowered with far swifter and more abstract intellects. Science can find no excuse for civilisation in Nature, and surely Herbert Spencer's whole attack on State intervention, because it is based on opposing the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, is one of the funniest samples of a distressing mental obliquity.'

'Once more, yes,' said Daniel; 'though, once more, not quite as I should put it.'

'You would put it more politely for Spencer?'

Daniel smiled.