Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/333

No. 3.] come out very clearly in such a book as this; we seem to have once more the atmosphere of eighteenth-century rationalism, its trust in abstract reason and lack of historical sense, its assumption that things have come to be through deliberate plan and intention. From the standpoint of the reason that seeks to comprehend the facts of life, not to construct them, there would still seem to be wisdom in the words of Lucretius—Natura dædala rerum.

The purpose of this book is to analyze and display the errors of fact and reasoning involved in the widely held opinion, alleged to be based upon biological science, that power is the basis of right. Though the author refers chiefly to German representatives of this view, such as Nietzsche and Bernhardi, the book was not written as a consequence of the War. Part of it was written before the War began, and the most important chapter (Chapter XII) had appeared as an article in the Revue anthropologique.

The first part of the book is largely devoted to establishing the meaning of terms. Though less interesting than the discussion of biological arguments which comes later, this part shows the difficulty of attaching any definite meaning, least of all a scientific one, to the proposition that might makes right. The saying either divests the word right of its normal meaning as applying to rights established by law or degenerates into the truism that a right which is the subject of contest is established only as a consequence of that contest. Otherwise, a claim to right based on alleged superior might is purely a priori, since, like Hobbes, the author holds that men are by nature nearly equal in their powers of destructiveness.

What is really intended, as a rule, by those who say that might makes right, is a glorification of power, and this is usually defended by reference to the rôle of natural selection in the formation of new species. In fact, however, the argument is entirely non-scientific, for it is impossible to extract any concept of idealized right from the facts and laws of science. More particularly, the argument commits the fallacy of confusing biological evolution with continuous and necessary progress. For the biologist evolution means merely progressive adaptation, and such adaptation may be quite contrary to what anyone would call progress. Even as regards adaptation, no biologist would claim that evolution shows continuous specialization. The most that can be said is that a given group shows progress up to a certain point in some particular type of specialization. It may be true to say that man has a more highly developed nervous system than the apes, or that some fishes have more elaborate swimming organs than others, but to say that man is in general more perfect than a fish is merely nonsense. M. Anthony is quite successful in showing that the protagonists of power in human development really have in mind a mystical philosophy of history which has more in common with the