Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/98

 natural philosophical half-poesy against "Charlatanism with its wanton superficialities and pseudo-scientific mysticism, against the poetic features of Darwinism."

Darwin comes in for a share of blame chiefly because he transferred the Malthusian theory of population from political economy to natural science, because he is entangled by his notions of breeding, so that his work is a sort of unscientific half-poetic attack against design in creation, and that the whole of Darwinism, after what he has borrowed from Lamark has been deducted, is a piece of brutality aimed against humanity.

Darwin had brought home with him as the result of his scientific journeys the conclusion that species of plants and animals are not fixed but are subject to variations. In order to pursue this idea he entered upon experiments in the breeding of plants and animals. Just for this reason England has become a classic land. The scientists of other countries, Germany, for example, have nothing to offer comparable with England in this respect. Moreover, most of the conclusions belong to the last century so that the establishment of the facts presented few difficulties. Darwin found that this artificial breeding produced differences in the species of plants and animals greater than occur among those which are universally recognised as belonging to different species. Therefore it was, up to a certain point, proved that species can change and furthermore there was established the possibility of a common ancestry for organisms which partake of the characteristics of different species.

Darwin now examined the question whether there were not in nature causes—which without the conscious intention of the breeder—might in the course of time, by means of heredity, produce changes in the living animal analogous to those produced by scientific breeding.