Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

This attitude of the time serving intellectual lackeys of the professorial chairs has brought with it another blighting curse—it has made a considerable number of working men suspicious of modern science itself. It is an old-time tragedy, this breaking with one’s best friend because of the groundless calumnies of an interested enemy.

This terribly mistaken antagonism to science has unfortunately found its way, in some measure, into the Socialist movement, though happily, increasing acquaintance with Socialism’s classic literature is breaking it down. In this connection the following passage from the pen of Isador Ladoff is very pertinent:

“Rationalistic modern Socialism is based, not exclusively on certain economic theories and maxims, as some narrow-minded ‘Socialists pure and simple’ think and would fain make us believe, but on the broad foundation of modern science and thought. The economic theories peculiar to modern Socialism are derived from the application of the results of the achievements of modern knowledge and philosophy to the field of social economics. The trouble with the ‘Socialists pure and simple’ is in the extreme limitation of their mental horizon. They happen to know, or rather imagine they have mastered Marxian economics, while modern science and philosophy remains to them a sealed letter. That is why they get irritated whenever and wherever they meet in the socialistic press an article containing something else than the everlasting parrot-like repetitions of pseudo-socialistic commonplaces and shibboleths. Every attempt to present to the attention of the readers of socialistic publications, glimpses of the radiant world of science and philosophy, leading up to socialistic ideas and ideals in all their world-redeeming significance, appears to the simpleminded and superstitious simon-pure Socialists as an attack on somebody or something, as a heresy and heterodoxy of some kind. To such people the religion of science is the religion of ignorance and vice versa, ignorance is their religion and science.”

The use of science and philosophy by the ruling class as a pretence for the appropriation of the lion’s share of the wealth produced by labor does not prove that workingmen should abandon philosophy as useless to their cause. On the contrary, as Dietzgen says: “Philosophy is a subject which closely concerns the working class,” and he adds: “This, of course, does by no means imply that every workingman should try to become acquainted with philosophy and study the relation between the idea and matter. From the fact that we all eat bread does not follow that we must all understand milling and baking. But just as we need millers and bakers, so does the working class stand in need of keen scholars who can follow up the tortuous ways of the false priests and lay bare the inanity of their tricks.”

It is quite clear that working men, instead of underestimating the value of mental training, should remember what a terrible weapon it has proved in the hands of their enemies. It is precisely because the workers have lacked this weapon, that in spite of their overwhelming numbers and physical strength, they have always been outwitted. “The emancipation of the working classes,” concludes Dietzgen, “requires that they should lay hold on the science of the century.”

Lester F. Ward, whose theories we shall now examine, warns us against the erroneous supposition “formerly quite prevalent,” that “science consists in the discovery of facts.” He maintains that “there is not a single science of which this is true, and a much more nearly correct definition would be that science consists in reasoning about facts.”

We may recall here that learned body which sneered at Darwin as “a mere theorizer” and conferred its honors upon an unknown man who had collected some facts about butterflies but had carefully avoided “reasoning about them.” Of course the value of this reasoning is that it leads to the discovery of those laws or generalizations which reveal the relation of the facts to each other, and thus enables us to appreciate their real significance.

Therefore we might venture to push the matter a little further and define science as the discovery of laws. But for the uniformity and invariability of physical phenomena, astronomy would be impossible. The discovery of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology. Dalton’s theory of atoms and Lavoisier’s permanence of matter emancipated chemistry from the superstitions of alchemy.

Ward is therefore on solid ground when he maintains that “the indispensable foundation of all economic and social science” consists in the fact that “all human activities and all social phenomena are rigidly subject to natural law.” It is just the difficulty of discerning uniform laws amidst the highly complex phenomena of society that delays the proper development of sociology, although, as we have seen, this difficulty is materially augmented by the class interests at stake.

Again, just as biology was hindered in its growth by the doctrine of special creations and, still earlier, Copernican astronomy was checked by the geocentric theory, so now the progress of sociology is restrained by the doctrine of divine providence. Believers in divine providence are well represented by the Hindoo who in his lesson on English composition spoke of his father as having “died according to the caprice of God which passeth all understanding.”