Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/598

580 further, in case its local position in the polypidom is unfavorable for taking in food, it is fed by the collective alimentary canal, into which flows the surplus of the individual production. A still more complicated social condition, with strict division of labor, is seen in the jellyfish known as the "Portuguese man-of-war."

I call attention to these familiar facts in order to show that in the animal kingdom communism and socialism are all the more pronounced the lower the organization of the groups among which they appear; and that, on the other hand, wherever among the higher animals conditions occur which savor of the socialistic principle, in the division of the results of the collective production, the egoism of the individual appears all the stronger. I do not at all mean hence to conclude that the case can not be otherwise in human society.

From the selflessness of the polyp to the egoism of the wolf is a development. How this development has been brought about, and how man must come under its action, Darwin teaches; and Leopold Jacoby tells us that the already quoted gospel of the Social Democracy, namely, Marx's work on "Capital," is "a continuation and complement of Darwin's 'Origin of Species' and his 'Descent of Man.' "

This same opinion was expressed one year earlier in "The People's State" ("Der Volksstaat," 1873, No. 31), and it is now our task to examine into its ground.

The only passage in which Marx himself speaks of any complement of Darwinism, though not in connection with his own researches, but à propos of the need of a special history of technology, is where he says: "Darwin has drawn attention to the history of natural technology, that is, the formation of plant and animal organs as production-instruments for the life of animals and plants. Should not equal attention be given to the history of the formation of the production organs of man in society, seeing that these organs are the material basis of every special society organization?" ("Capital," page 385.)

But the scientific method, that of proving by facts the relations between phenomena, is employed by Marx; and in my opinion he is in the right when he protests against the supposition that his dialectic method is at bottom Hegelian. But neither does he collect all the facts—for example, he knows only on the one hand the oppressor and the extortioner, and on the other their victims reduced to misery—nor does he refrain from gratuitous assumptions, as for instance that of the "Unpaid Labor," the most momentous of them all. Again, it happens that, from his not understanding the results of the doctrine of development, the true and actual relations of sociology to Darwinism are hidden from him. For example, he says that "in reality each special historic mode of production has its own special and historically valid laws of population. An abstract law of population holds for plants and animals only in so far as man does not interfere."

Engels, in the work already quoted (page 491), repeats a similar