SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM. 581 



proposition ; but it is not correct, if we use the term " law " in the 

 one sense permitted by exact natural science. The conditions of prop- 

 agation among plants and animals, the results of their multiplication, 

 vary according to circumstances; and man with his experiments in 

 breeding does not correct Nature, he only copies her. It is plainly out 

 of the question here to speak of laws of population ; it were better 

 instead to say that the conditions of population in each period are the 

 effects of special, variable causes peculiar to each stage of develop- 

 ment. Cases which are the result of varying circumstances and events 

 are not laws, nor do they justify us in inferring fixed laws. 



The attempt has been made, not indeed by Marx himself, but by 

 one of his followers, Leopold Jacoby, to connect logically, in one con- 

 tinuous process, social evolution and its ultimate term, the Socialist- 

 Democratic ideal, with nature's evolution. 



He does the impossible with a sophistical argumentation that re- 

 minds us of Hegel's dialectic : he is an enthusiast, but it is not for me 

 to pass judgment on his services to Socialist Democracy. Plainly he 

 is an enfant terrible for his party. His scientific ideas are of the nar- 

 rowest kind. Nevertheless, we must reckon with him, since he is the 

 only Socialist-Democrat writer who makes any pretense to observe sci- 

 entific method in this matter, i. e., the connection between the theory 

 of development and Socialist Democracy. We will later consider En- 

 gels's relation to that subject. 



Social evolution is nowadays represented by the leaders of Socialist 

 Democracy as being a process of perfectionment necessarily progressing 

 toward a definite end ; and as, rightly enough, they do not divorce man 

 from nature, it is plainly their purpose to discover oneness and conti- 

 nuity in social and in natural evolution. 



Revolution, say the Social Democrats, is correction of perverted 

 conditions or re-formation for the sake of improvement. Copernicus 

 happily expressed this idea when he gave to his work which upset the 

 astronomical notions of his time the title " De Revolutionibus." It is 

 of no consequence whatever that this is not the true title of the book, 

 but " De Orbium Coelestium Revolutionibus," or that " revolutio " 

 means a turning round and not an overturning. 



In short, in these revolutions, as the Socialist-Democratic philosophy 

 further teaches, " we recognize an ever self-perfecting origination and 

 formation of things in the universe " : so much we learn from Kant 

 and Laplace. Then came Lamarck with the " doctrine of the continu- 

 ous and successive development of organic beings on the earth," but for 

 half a century he failed to obtain a hearing till Darwin procured for the 

 doctrine full acceptance. Thus we have to thank Lamarck and Darwin 

 for the fact that we understand the nature of the two great " revolu- 

 tions," whereof the one produced the existence of organisms in the 

 transition of the inorganic into the organic, while the idea of the other 

 had for its object the appearance of man. 



