Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/603

Rh God, a sort of infallible bugbear under the guise of an Omnipotent Idea. The whole thing is misty, mystic, supernatural, in no sense scientific, least of all is it a Darwinian explication of facts.

Darwinism holds the exact opposite of all this, maintaining that development does not proceed according to ideas. Darwinism sees in nature only forces, laws, causes, and effects. Ideas it must for the present leave to the philosophers; and, moreover, it has absolutely no points of contact with the doctrine of ideas contained in the Socialist-Democrat catechism. Hence, when the Socialist Democracy bases the realization of its ideal on the fact that men who are conscious of the impelling ideas must irresistibly push on the work, and so carries the masses on into a belief in these ideas, it must itself be held responsible. As for Darwinism, it gives no encouragement to such imaginings, and hence must, in this respect, be simply indifferent for all, whether they hate Social Democracy or whether they love it.

But there is a category of scientific men who look on the origin of species as a development of the higher out of the lower; who find the Darwinian principle insufficient; who will have nothing unaccounted for, and who therefore conceal their ignorance under such phrases as "tendency to perfection" or "aiming at an end." I might also refer to the "Philosophy of the Unconscious"—now, as I believe, in process of decay—a philosophy which, whenever it knows not how to explain anything, solemnly invokes the aid of its "Unconscious." Between these muddled auxiliaries and the Socialist Democrat's "ideas which govern revolutions and determine the re-formation of perverted conditions," there exists an unmistakable though perhaps "unconscious" relationship.

There is, then, a point of contact between Socialist Democracy and Darwinism; but, as far as we have examined it, it is seen to rest on erroneous suppositions and ignorance of the essence of the development doctrine. So far we have found it concerned only with a few theoretical propositions; and we have had nothing to say about the practical realization of the Socialistic idea, or of the doctrines which might perhaps be borrowed from Darwinism to add to it strength.

The Socialist Democrats are unanimous in expressing discontent with the social conditions at present existing. But with respect to the specific organization of society in the future their leaders are very reticent. So much is certain, that the great mass of the workingmen, who now have to sell their entire strength for wages that merely suffice to support life, will in the future perform no so-called "unpaid labor." They will have a share in those higher enjoyments the prerequisite condition of which is a higher mental development. Opportunity for attaining this is afforded every one in the Socialist-Democratic state, by a considerable shortening of the hours of purely mechanical toil, and by opening perfectly free schools of every grade. When the whole population has been in this way refined, there is no longer