584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lions of lowly species have perished one after another, giving way to 

 better, i. e., to stronger ; and many millions whose slightly variant 

 ancestors escaped from their enemies and rivals have survived. A sea 

 peopled only by fishes, or the land only by mammals, is something 

 unnatural. Thus, the imperfect endures; the perfect, the homogeneous, 

 left to itself alone, becomes self- destructive, as the New-Zealanders 

 began to prey on each other so soon as they had exterminated their 

 only edible wild animal, the dinornis. 



In short, Darwinism shows that the evolution of organic life is not 

 to be summed up in a few abstract formula. It calls attention to the 

 fact that with the gradual succession of species goes on, with other 

 movements, a slow perfectionment in different directions ; and this 

 necessary but yet only partial progress it seeks to explain by " selec- 

 tion of the fittest " in the decay or the backwardness of less gifted 

 individuals and species. 



In the vjhole system of Darioinism we find, unfortunately, no hint 

 of a law which shall in advance determine this perfectionment ; and it 

 is laughable to observe how, on the one side, people are complaining 

 that we set up Chance on a throne as a universal principle, while, on 

 the other side, people are making the discovery that the guiding prin- 

 ciples of the Socialist Democrats, those principles which are shaping 

 the future, are corollaries of the theory of development. 



The strength of the Socialist-Democratic teaching lies in this, that 

 the candidates and members of the party, men unpracticed in logical 

 thinking, are sternly schooled in a few principles, and taught to regard 

 the actualization of the idea as something necessary ex necessitate rei. 

 The fundamental mistake of supposing that Social Democracy has any 

 point of contact with Darwinism arises, as we have explained, out of 

 the supposition that Darwinism too has brought to light ideas which 

 govern organic transformation — such ideas as are supposed to be 

 necessary for calling forth social revolutions. 



The Socialist Democrats do away, after their own fashion, with the 

 personal Godhead, and for this, of course, " atheistic science " is held 

 to answer. In L. Jacoby's work we read : 



We call the idea the foreknown existence of the emboflied total result of a 

 progressive re-formation. But this foreknowledge can exist in no other way 

 save this, that the thing to which we grant the idea has itself been carried into the 

 progressive re-formation ; and from this knowledge follows the other side of the 

 essence of the idea, namely, the being dominated by the idea, the being forcibly 

 moved by the idea in a given direction. If to these first organisms we allow the 

 idea of Man, we ijyso facto recognize their domination by this idea ; in other 

 words, we see how they have been constrained so to transform themselves as 

 finally to produce from themselves man. 



This thought, stripped of the studied verbiage in which it is here 

 invested, has very generally become rooted in the minds of the Socialist 

 Democrats. In this way they have set up, in the place of a personal 



