The thinker who would expand his intellectual wings in this monistic atmosphere, must possess not only a “discriminating” mind, but also, as Marcus Hitch suggests, a “unifying” mind. There are two errors he must avoid; the creation of distinctions that do not exist and the ignoring of distinctions that do.
The chief sinner against this first canon of dialectical thinking is our old friend the theologian. When the evolutionary naturalists demonstrated the hopeless untruth of his “revealed” legends about the origin of men and things, he sought refuge in the ingenious theory that these fables while scientifically indefensible were, notwithstanding, spiritually true. In short, scientific truth and spiritual truth were so distinct as to have no vital relations. These “artful dodgers” have relieved controversial literature of much of its wonted heaviness and contributed generally to the gaiety of the nations.
Socialists have always been among the first to enjoy these entertaining performances, and it seems like divine retribution when these same theological and “Reverend” persons tumble over into the Socialist camp and bring their obsolete methods of thinking with them.
They dub themselves “Christian” Socialists and proceed to show that “Socialism is a philosophy concerning the social and economic life of man, and not the religious at all.” When Marx declared that political and legal and other social institutions and ideas were the result of economic conditions and class interests, religious institutions and ideas were, of course, exempt.
After a mental contortion like that, what is to prevent a reconciliation between the 17th century twaddle of the methodist pulpit and the materialist conception of history?
Those who break the second canon given, are not all theologians. Among those who ignore distinctions that do exist, the biological sociologist is entitled to conspicuous mention.
August Comte, who “attempted to make of sociology a sort of transcendental biology,” had at least this excuse that he wrote his positivist philosophy before Darwin published his “Origin of Species” and, therefore, while biology was yet in long clothes and sociology was unborn. Although Comte is generally regarded as the founder of sociology, these limitations made it impossible to do little more than invent the name and foresee its possibility.
These excuses, however, can scarcely be invoked for Haeckel, who, as we have already seen, wholly ignored in his inferences, fundamental differences between the division of labor in animal societies and that division in human societies. Haeckel’s biological sociology conveniently overlooks the rather important fact that while a working bee can not by any possibility act as a drone, the working man has at least no physical disabilities to prevent him from doing anything that pertains to the role of a prince. Reasoning by analogy is always dangerous, especially when the analogy itself breaks down.
While it is well to keep these rules in mind, it must be conceded that their critical application is somewhat limited when we come to Spencer’s famous analogy between animal organisms and human societies. The “synthetic” philosopher was much Haeckel’s superior in sociology, and he possessed an immense fund of biological lore that was unavailable to Comte writing a quarter of a century earlier.
Thus Spencer seems to recognize that his essay on “The Social Organism” is largely an ingenious analogy, from which conclusions must be drawn with caution. Not that bourgeois scientists have always exhibited a very scientific temper in this regard. On the contrary they have, on every possible occasion, proclaimed that certain alleged truths in physics or biology were in irreconcilable contradiction to certain Socialist conclusions in sociology.