Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/138

 Virchow is, that he don't understand or appreciate it. In regard to the anthropological objection, Professor Huxley declares in his preface that Virchow is entirely in the wrong. Authority is here opposed to authority; and Huxley asserts that all we know concerning the most ancient men harmonizes with the view that they have originated under the general law of evolution.

In regard to Virchow's attempt to bring evolution into reproach by associating it with communism. Professor Huxley says: "I think I shall have all fair-minded men with me, when I also give vent to my reprobation of the introduction of the sinister arts of unscrupulous political warfare into scientific controversy, manifested in the attempt to connect the doctrines he (Haeckel) advocates with those of a political party which is at present the object of hatred and persecution in his native land."

Professor Haeckel in dealing with this charge says that "those two theories are about as compatible as fire and water," and remarks upon the subject as follows: "With all these empty accusations, as with all the empty reproaches and groundless objections which Virchow brings against the doctrine of evolution, he takes good care in no way to touch the kernel of the matter. How, indeed, would it have been possible, without arriving at conclusions wholly opposed to those which he has declared? For the theory of descent proclaims, more clearly than any other scientific theory, that the equality of individuals which socialism strives after is an impossibility; that it stands in fact in irreconcilable contradiction to the inevitable inequality of individuals which actually and everywhere subsists. Socialism demands equal rights, equal duties, equal possessions, equal enjoyments for every citizen alike; the theory of descent proves, in exact opposition to this, that the realization of this demand is a pure impossibility, and that in the constitutionally organized communities of men, as of the lower animals, neither rights nor duties, neither possessions nor enjoyments, have ever been equal for all the members alike, nor can ever be. Throughout the evolutionist theory, as in its biological branch, the theory of descent—the great law of specialization or differentiation—teaches us that a multiplicity of phenomena is developed from original unity, heterogeneity from original similarity, and the composite organism from original simplicity. The conditions of existence are dissimilar for each individual from the beginning of its existence; even the inherited qualities, the natural "disposition," are more or less unlike; how then can the problems of life and their solution be alike for all? The more highly political life is organized, the more prominent is the great principle of the division of labor, and the more requisite it becomes, for the lasting security of the whole state, that its members should be variously distributed in the manifold tasks of life; and as the work to be performed by different individuals is of the most various kind, as well as the corresponding outlay of strength, skill, property, etc., the reward of the work must naturally be also extremely various. These are such simple and tangible facts that one would suppose that every reasonable and unprejudiced politician would recommend the theory of descent and the evolution hypothesis in general as the best antidote to the fathomless absurdity of extravagant social leveling.

"Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist. The theory of evolution teaches that in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably, and more or less prematurely. The germs of every species of animal and plant, and the young individuals that spring from them, are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their hardly won life-goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable fact; only the picked minority of the qualified 'fittest' is in a position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the competitors must necessarily perish