Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/105

 have come about by a chemical process. But perhaps the philosophy of realism can give us some assistance here since it is engaged with independent organic natural products, without any descent one from another. How can these come into being? By original creation? But up to the present not even the most audacious advocates of spontaneous generation have claimed to create in this way anything except bacteria, fungi, or other very elementary organisms, but not insects, birds, fish or mammals. If these homogeneous products of—nature it is understood for all this discussion that they are organic—are not related through descent, they or their ancestors, then "where the thread of descent breaks" they must have been placed in the world by a separate act of creation, and this again requires a creator, what we call "deism."

Herr Duehring further explains that it was a piece of superficiality on the part of Darwin to make the mere fact of the sex-composition of qualities the foundation for the existence of these qualities." Here we have again a piece of pure imagination on the part of our profound philosopher. On the contrary Darwin says that natural selection has to do only with the maintenance of variations and not with their origin. This new supposition however of things which Darwin did not say serves to assist us to this deep idea of Duehring. "If a principle of individual variation had been sought in the inner scheme of creation it would have been an enirely rational idea. For it is natural to unite the idea of universal generation with that of sex propagation, and to regard the so-called original creation from the higher point of view, not as absolutely antagonistic to reproduction but even as reproduction itself." And the