Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/285

Rh and economics, but who shows such a want of familiarity with the elements of social science as gives confusion to his exposition. Notwithstanding its merits, looseness and inaccuracy in important parts of his paper must go far to impair our confidence in the integrity of his intellectual work.

What trust, for example, can we have in the information or the thinking of a man who says, "Darwin borrowed his ideas of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest from Malthus, from whom he also drew his theories of evolution and transformism"? Now, "the struggle for existence" is certainly not an idea belonging either to Darwin or Malthus, but is far older than both. And so also with the principle of the "survival of the fittest"; it is a formula of Herbert Spencer, adopted by him to represent the same idea that Mr. Darwin expresses by the term "natural selection"; but the conception is found in the writings of the earlier naturalists, and what the modern thinkers have done is simply to work out new and important views of their results.

M. de Laveleye constantly speaks in his article of "Darwin's idea," and constantly misconceives it. What Mr. Darwin did was to show how the ideas or principles or conditions of nature known as the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, together with heredity and variation, give rise to new species of plants and animals. It was an idea belonging strictly to the sphere of biological science, and aiming to account rationally for the great diversities of kinds among organic beings.

M. de Laveleye not only misapprehends "Darwin's idea," of which he is constantly talking, but speaks of it as something seized upon by Herbert Spencer and applied by him to human society. But, in the first place, Darwin had nothing to apply; and, in the second place, Spencer was in the field long before him. The struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest were ideas which Spencer had developed in their social applications, tracing out their results and assigning their limitations in his book upon human society, of 1851; while "Darwin's idea," belonging in quite another field, was not enunciated till 1859.

But this laxity of thought and misinformation affecting the fundamental conception of his argument go further. Not only does he misapprehend the "Darwinian idea," which is in fact entirely irrelevant to his argument, and not only does he constantly make Spencer the follower of Darwin, where Spencer was the actual predecessor, but he discloses an ignorance of the principles he professes to deal with, in their social bearings, which is somewhat surprising in a man who ventures to take issue with the leading sociologist of the age. He accuses Spencer of borrowing from Darwin, and applying to society an inhuman principle, which reverses all the equities of government and gives license to the worst of crimes. He says, "If it be really advisable that the law of the survival of the fittest should be established among us, the first step to be taken would be the abolition of all laws which punish theft and murder." And does M. de Laveleye really consider that it is optional with anybody whether the principle of the survival of the fittest shall be established in society or not? Are not the principles of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest simple demonstrated facts of nature, as old as men's observations of the economy of life upon earth,' and no more to be escaped than temperature, the atmosphere, or gravitation? Because the law of gravitation is destructive, and maims and kills people daily, and everywhere, and without remorse, is the question to be raised whether or not it is to be established among us? And will M. de Laveleye maintain that the only way "to establish among us this heartless and cruel law of gravitation" is to give everybody a license to kill? The law