Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/599

Rh proposition; but it is not correct, if we use the term "law" in the one sense permitted by exact natural science. The conditions of propagation among plants and animals, the results of their multiplication, vary according to circumstances; and man with his experiments in breeding does not correct Nature, he only copies her. It is plainly out of the question here to speak of laws of population; it were better instead to say that the conditions of population in each period are the effects of special, variable causes peculiar to each stage of development. Cases which are the result of varying circumstances and events are not laws, nor do they justify us in inferring fixed laws.

The attempt has been made, not indeed by Marx himself, but by one of his followers, Leopold Jacoby, to connect logically, in one continuous process, social evolution and its ultimate term, the Socialist-Democratic ideal, with nature's evolution.

He does the impossible with a sophistical argumentation that reminds us of Hegel's dialectic: he is an enthusiast, but it is not for me to pass judgment on his services to Socialist Democracy. Plainly he is an enfant terrible for his party. His scientific ideas are of the narrowest kind. Nevertheless, we must reckon with him, since he is the only Socialist-Democrat writer who makes any pretense to observe scientific method in this matter, i. e., the connection between the theory of development and Socialist Democracy. We will later consider Engels's relation to that subject.

Social evolution is nowadays represented by the leaders of Socialist Democracy as being a process of perfectionment necessarily progressing toward a definite end; and as, rightly enough, they do not divorce man from nature, it is plainly their purpose to discover oneness and continuity in social and in natural evolution.

Revolution, say the Social Democrats, is correction of perverted conditions or re-formation for the sake of improvement. Copernicus happily expressed this idea when he gave to his work which upset the astronomical notions of his time the title "De Revolutionibus." It is of no consequence whatever that this is not the true title of the book, but "De Orbium Cœlestium Revolutionibus," or that "revolutio" means a turning round and not an overturning.

In short, in these revolutions, as the Socialist-Democratic philosophy further teaches, "we recognize an ever self-perfecting origination and formation of things in the universe": so much we learn from Kant and Laplace. Then came Lamarck with the "doctrine of the continuous and successive development of organic beings on the earth," but for half a century he failed to obtain a hearing till Darwin procured for the doctrine full acceptance. Thus we have to thank Lamarck and Darwin for the fact that we understand the nature of the two great "revolutions," whereof the one produced the existence of organisms in the transition of the inorganic into the organic, while the idea of the other had for its object the appearance of man.