Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/813

 THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY 797

When Ammon speaks of the "natural basis" of social order, he thinks he has found that unalterable law of nature which neither may nor can be shaken. In his social-aristocratic lofti- ness he misunderstands the socialistic theory when he attributes to it the view that our present social order is "unnatural," or when he makes it disregard the law of evolution. Theoretical socialism stands, foremost of all social theories, on the ground of evolutionary conceptions. To that extent i.e., in respect of the theory of evolution Darwinism is no recourse against social- democratic conceptions. Only when it comes to the discussion whether the Darwinian doctrine of selection is compatible with the socialistic doctrine of equality can Ammon assert that the theory of selection points clearly to an aristocracy. If only those individuals survive that are strong and best fitted for the conditions of life, while the weak are destroyed in the struggle for existence, there is little room for the idea that equality is to be attributed to all individuals. Nature does not treat all alike ; she makes strict and severe selections.

But the consequence that Ammon draws by no means follows, viz., that the social system of today with its abrupt class dis- tinctions is essentially without need of improvement, and that improvements in the sense of social reform are impossible. Ammon repeats the old blunder, which social theorists have fre- quently committed, of taking a natural law not to say a mere hypothesis bodily over into social theory. We may think what we please about the metaphysical question of the freedom of the will ; a certain conscious teleology, in the individual and social psychological sense, cannot be denied. It at least constitutes a recourse, which must not be undervalued, against the decisive application of a blind natural law to social life. Moreover, the whole of practical physics is nothing but the conquest of natural laws by natural laws. Why shall it not be possible in social life, assuming the validity of the law of selection here also, to modify its operation by the force of other laws?

Ammon constructs, after the model of Galton, a so-called "curve of intelligence," and hereupon a "curve of welfare," both