Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/119

 Rh its facts, it marshals its particulars, it pieces together its hypotheses; then assuming its hypotheses and its systems, it explains its facts and its particulars by them. Galileo's experiments with falling bodies from which he arrived at the laws governing the rate at which a body falls through space, consisted of a grouping of ascertained facts; he enunciated the fact that a projectile travels on a parabolic path by a grouping of a more complicated set of facts; on the other hand, Darwin's work consisted not so much in proving the theory of evolution from a series of grouped facts (though he did that more than any of his predecessors), but in using that theory to explain facts, and so to this day we hear oceasional disputes as to whether the Darwinian method was inductive or deductive, whereas, as a matter of fact, it was a scientific blending of both.

The Socialist method is the Darwinian method. It begins with social phenomena, with the rational desire to group them in systems, and with the equally rational desire to discover their causes and visualise their complete fulfilment. Its interest consists in the whence and whither of society.

What are the facts in which it is interested to begin with? They may be grouped under the generic term of poverty. I have shown that the source of this poverty is not only in personal shortcomings. If that were so, the interest which is the origin of the Socialist movement would only have raised a moral and an educational problem. The source of