Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/602

584 of lowly species have perished one after another, giving way to better, i. e., to stronger; and many millions whose slightly variant ancestors escaped from their enemies and rivals have survived. A sea peopled only by fishes, or the land only by mammals, is something unnatural. Thus, the imperfect endures; the perfect, the homogeneous, left to itself alone, becomes self-destructive, as the New-Zealanders began to prey on each other so soon as they had exterminated their only edible wild animal, the dinornis.

In short, Darwinism shows that the evolution of organic life is not to be summed up in a few abstract formula. It calls attention to the fact that with the gradual succession of species goes on, with other movements, a slow perfectionment in different directions; and this necessary but yet only partial progress it seeks to explain by "selection of the fittest" in the decay or the backwardness of less gifted individuals and species.

In the whole system of Darwinism we find, unfortunately, no hint of a law which shall in advance determine this perfectionment; and it is laughable to observe how, on the one side, people are complaining that we set up Chance on a throne as a universal principle, while, on the other side, people are making the discovery that the guiding principles of the Socialist Democrats, those principles which are shaping the future, are corollaries of the theory of development.

The strength of the Socialist-Democratic teaching lies in this, that the candidates and members of the party, men unpracticed in logical thinking, are sternly schooled in a few principles, and taught to regard the actualization of the idea as something necessary ex necessitate rei. The fundamental mistake of supposing that Social Democracy has any point of contact with Darwinism arises, as we have explained, out of the supposition that Darwinism too has brought to light ideas which govern organic transformation—such ideas as are supposed to be necessary for calling forth social revolutions.

The Socialist Democrats do away, after their own fashion, with the personal Godhead, and for this, of course, "atheistic science" is held to answer. In L. Jacoby's work we read:

This thought, stripped of the studied verbiage in which it is here invested, has very generally become rooted in the minds of the Socialist Democrats. In this way they have set up, in the place of a personal