Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/605

Rh could Darwinism, "carried out to its logical conclusions," be inscribed on their banner.

If the Socialist-Democratic doctrines had any organic relationship to the anthropological side of Darwinism, science would find its way into it. It would ill befit Science to complain of this. In fact, the Socialist Democrats believe that such alliance has already been effected between science and their philosophy, and it will do no harm to consider the situation, though as conceived by the Socialist Democrats it implies a fundamental misunderstanding.

In the "Volksstaat" (ubi supra) we read:

Then the conclusion is drawn that, inasmuch as the reactionaries will not accept the descent of man, they do all they can to prevent the recognition of Darwinism as a support of Socialist Democracy, and to check its diffusion among the people.

How the Socialist Democrats picture to themselves the equality of all men, and first of all the equal natural condition of all men, we see in Jacoby: "Man is good from the beginning"; "The brain of each individual man is capable of being developed so that it shall of itself do all thinking, just as the hand of each individual man is capable of being developed so that it shall do everything with the aid of machinery." That hitherto we have seen only capacity for equal development, while in fact there exists great inequality of development, is due to the fact that only those who enjoy unnatural privileges have the time requisite for the development of their consciousness. When men shall once have been properly brought up to equality in the Socialistic state, then equal development, with bias toward the good, will come of itself, for "knowledge of nature compels us to regard all men as beings capable of development in precisely the same measure."

But by the term "all men" is to be understood the male portion of the race, for many Socialist Democrats agree with high authorities in holding that woman, by reason of her abnormal brain-structure, must, in the state of the future, act a subordinate part: judgment, action, are not for her, but only feeling, and the faculty of order.

In all this it were difficult to find a single trait that can be referred to the Darwinian anthropology. The Socialist's "aspiration toward perfection" is associated with his ideal of the equality of mankind. Now, this illusion Darwinism utterly demolishes. The very principle of development negatives the principle of equality. So far does