Socialism: Positive and Negative

by Robert Rives La Monte

But just as according to the vulgar superstition the tail of a snake that has been killed wiggles till sundown, so this book of Mallock's is merely a false show of life made by a theory that received its deathblow long since. It is the wiggling of the tail of the snake that Herbert Spencer killed thirty years ago with his little book "The Study of Sociology." The environment philosophy in one form or another has come to occupy the entire field of human thought. We now look for the explanation of every phenomenon in the conditions that surrounded its birth and development. The best application of this environment philosophy to intellectual and literary phenomena that has ever been made is Taine's History of English Literature.

But while Spencer's Study of Sociology is the most signal and brilliant refutation of the Great Man theory, no one man really killed that theory. The general spread and acceptance of Darwinism has produced an intellectual atmosphere in which such a theory can no more live than a fish can live out of water.

By Darwinism we mean, as you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection—selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, was transported to the field of sociology by Spencer and applied with great power to all human institutions, legal, moral, economic, religious, etc. Spencer has taught the world that all social institutions are fluid and not fixed. As Karl Marx said in the preface to the first edition of Capital: "The present society is no solid crystal, but an organization capable of change, and is constantly changing," and again in the preface to the second edition, "Every historically developed social form is in fluid movement." This is the theory of Evolution in its broadest sense, and it has struck a death-blow to the conception of Permanence so dear to the hearts of the bourgeoisie who love to sing to their Great God, Private Property, "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." "Saecula saeculorum." "For the Ages of Ages."

Before natural science had thus revolutionized the intellectual atmosphere, great men proclaiming the doctrines of modern socialism might have been rained down from Heaven, but there would have been no socialist movement. In fact many of its ideas had found utterance centuries before, but the economic conditions, and consequently the intellectual conditions were not ripe, and these ideas were still-born, or died in infancy.

The general acceptance of the idea that all things change, that property, marriage, religion, etc., are in process of evolution and are destined to take on new forms prepared the way for Socialism. A man who has read Wallace and Darwin is ready to read Marx and Engels.

Now the story of the birth of Darwinism is itself a proof of the fallacy of the Great Man theory, and a signal confirmation of the view that new ideas, theories and discoveries emanate from the material conditions. The role of the great man is still an important one. We need the men who are capable of abstract thought, capable of perceiving the essential relations and significance of the facts, and of drawing correct inductions from them. Such men are rare, but there are always enough of them to perform these functions. And the Great Man, born out of due time, before the material and economic conditions are ripe for him, can effect nothing. When the conditions are ripe, the new idea always occurs to more than one man; that is, the same conditions and facts force the same idea upon different minds. It is true there is always some one man who gives this idea its best expression or best marshals the evidence of the facts in its support, and the idea usually becomes inseparably linked with his name. In this way does our race express its gratitude to its great men and perpetuate their memory.

Darwinism or the theory of Natural Selection was in this way independently discovered by Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin, and the popular judgment has not erred in giving the chief credit to Charles Darwin.

Wallace's paper "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species," written by Wallace on one of the far-away islands of the Malay Archipelago, where he was studying the Geographical Distribution of Species, appeared in the "Annals of Natural History" in 1855. Its resultant conclusion was "that every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a preexisting closely allied species." Mr. Darwin tells us that Mr. Wallace wrote him that the cause to which he attributed this coincidence was no other than "generation with modification," or in other words that the "closely allied ante-type" was the parent stock from which the new form had been derived by variation.

Mr. Wallace's second paper, which in my judgment is the clearest and best condensed statement of the Doctrine of the Struggle for Existence and the principle of Natural Selection ever written, was written by Mr. Wallace at Ternate in the Malay Archipelago, in February, 1858, and sent to Mr. Darwin. It was called "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." Mr. Wallace requested Mr. Darwin to show it to Sir Chas. Lyell, the father of Modern Geology, and accordingly Dr. Hooker, the great botanist, brought it to Sir Chas. Lyell. They were both so struck with the complete agreement of the conclusions of Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace that they thought it would be unfair to publish one without the other, so this paper and a chapter from Darwin's unpublished manuscript of the "Origin of Species" were read before the Linnaean Society on the same evening and published in their Proceedings for 1858, and thus appeared in the same year, 1859, as Marx's Critique of Political Economy. This theory of Natural Selection is, you know, in brief, that more animals of every kind are born than can possibly survive, than can possibly get a living. This gives rise to a Battle for Life. In this battle those are the victors who are the best able to secure food for themselves and their offspring and are best able by fight or flight to protect themselves from their enemies. This is called the Law of the Survival of the Fittest, but remember, the Fittest are not always the best or most highly developed forms, but simply those forms best suited to the then existing environment. These two extremely interesting papers of Wallace are printed as the two first chapters of his book "Natural Selection and Tropical Nature," published by MacMillan, a book so fascinating I would beg all my hearers and readers who have not read it to do so.

This law of double or multiple discovery holds good of all great discoveries and inventions, and is notably true of the first of the three great thoughts that we ordinarily associate with the name of Karl Marx. These three are: