Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/600

582 Thus the philosophy of Social Democracy resembles that of Plato, in teaching that the idea hovers over the bodily form. It is the idea that dominates everywhere, determining the forms of all things. Hence, down to the advent of man there was in nature a steady, thorough, unconscious striving.

And here comes in another great revolution, the third—viz., the universal apparition of the consciousness of the human race, the philosophical establishment of which is the task which Marx has set himself. Thus, then, as we read in the "Volksstaat" (ubi supra), "Darwin and Marx have, by their profound and ingenious researches, carried on in totally different scientific fields, attained results of the utmost importance to mankind, and which, being intimately correlated, mutually support and complement one another."

As Social Democracy holds the accomplishment of its ends to be inevitable and necessary, so, as we have seen, it is one of its cardinal principles that all the phenomena which take place in matter, and all developments of matter, are prefigured and predetermined in the idea. The honest workingman thus learns that a statue is less successful, the less conscious the sculptor was of the idea of the work of beauty inherent in the marble block, and the more he suffered himself during his labor to be influenced by considerations of profit and the like. "In this example of the sculptor and his work, we have," says Jacoby, "a direct proof (direct proof!) of the truth of the proposition that ideas are contained in unconscious nature."

I shall be asked whether the utterances just recounted represent the sympathy between Socialist Democracy and Darwinism—whether these abstract and rather curious and confused theses and propositions represent the dangerous elements, that is, the politically dangerous elements imported into Socialist Democracy from the development theory.

With a few additions, which we will make further on, they do!

How, then, does Darwinism stand with respect to these cardinal ideas of the socialistic development doctrine, as laid down by a philosopher of that school?

We find here two ideas wherein Socialist Democracy purports to be at one with the scientific doctrine of Evolution, viz., Development or Revolution is re-formation—i. e., correction of perverted conditions; and All development has for its basis an idea which designates the future goal, and which governs the movement toward the same. In themselves these propositions are plainly innocent enough, and if they were a result of Darwinian research, they need not be disowned. But Darwinism disclaims the honor of having established any such principles.

What we call origin, or development of species, is in the first place not a reversal of perverted conditions. In such play upon words we have never indulged. The Darwinian principle of development is Natural Selection, and people are not wont to select from perverted types. It is true that the struggle amid which selection goes on includes also