ENVIRONMENT AND EVOLUTION — KROPOTKIN. 427 



Sciences at Paris, and his Systeme analytique des connaissances posi- 

 tives de l'homme, of which the last two are entirely ignored in this 

 country and the first is frequently misquoted. These teachings show 

 that Lamarck had not the least leaning towards a metaphysical 

 Natur Philosophie and they have nothing to do with the vitalist and 

 other theories of the German Neo-Lamarckians, of whom France (a 

 distinguished botanist) and Dr. Adolph Wagner are prominent 

 representatives. 1 



A synthesis of the views of Darwin and Lamarck, or rather of 

 natural selection and the direct action of environment, described 

 by Spencer as direct and indirect adaptation, was thus the necessary 

 outcome of the researches in biology which have been carried 

 on for the last 30 or 40 years. If considerations lying outside the 

 true domain of biology, such as those which inspire the neo-Lemarck- 

 ians and inspired Weismann, cease to interfere, a synthetic view of 

 evolution (in which natural selection will be understood as a struggle 

 for life carried on under both its individual and its still more im- 

 portant social aspect) will probably rally most biologists. And if 

 this really takes place, then it will be easy to free ourselves from the 

 reproach which has been addressed to nineteenth-century science — 

 the reproach that while it has aided men to liberate themselves from 

 superstitions, it has ignored those aspects of nature which ought to 

 have been, in a naturalistic conception of the universe, the very 

 foundations of human ethics, and of which Bacon and Darwin 

 have already had a glimpse. 2 



Unfortunately the vulgarisers of the teachings of Darwin, speak- 

 ing in the name of science, have succeeded in eliminating this deeply 

 philosophical idea from the naturalistic conception of the universe 

 worked out in the nineteenth century. They have succeeded in 

 persuading men that the last word of science was a pitiless individ- 

 ual struggle for life. But the prominence which is now beginning 

 to be given to the direct action of environment in the evolution of 

 species, by eliminating the Malthusian idea about the necessity of 

 a competition to the knife between all the individuals of a species 

 for evolving new species, opens the way for a quite different com- 

 prehension of the struggle for life, and of nature altogether. 



1 See R. H. France, Der heutige Stand der Darwin'schon Fragen, Leipzig, 1907 ; and 

 Dr. Adolf Wagner, Geschichte des Lamarckismus, Stuttgart, 1909. 



2 Cf. "The Morality of Nature," in Nineteenth Century, March, 1905. 



