SH. vi.] THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY. 483 



evolutionist, that this partial dissolution of social relations 

 should have been followed by that disgraceful epoch in 

 which principles of international equity worthy only of 

 Attila or Genghis Khan were embodied in the barbarous 

 ethical code of the First Empire. 



A still more complete illustration of the tendency of pure 

 iconoclasm toward social dissolution is to be found in certain 

 radical theories concerning labour, property, and marriage, 

 which have been current during the present century among 

 people untrained in science and unfamiliar with the lessons 

 of history, and which played their part in shaping the 

 policy of the Parisian Commune of 1871. For the purposes 

 of our inquiry it is not necessary for me to offer a matured 

 judgment concerning this unfortunate historical transaction 

 in all its actual complexity, even were I competent to do so. 

 It is enough for us to remember that among those political 

 leaders who sought to inaugurate the reign of the Commune, 

 a considerable number professed to hold the doctrines com 

 monly known as communistic, and that the social relations 

 which they were intent upon establishing are precisely those 

 which Sir Henry Maine has shown to have existed among 

 primeval men, and which exist to-day among the lowest 

 races. This desire to return to the community of property 

 and of wives characteristic of primitive savagery, to regulate 

 human concerns by status and not by contract, to crush out 

 capital and with it the possibility of any industrial integra 

 tion, to abolish the incentives which make man sow to-day 

 that he may reap in the future, to destroy social differentia 

 tion by constraining all persons alike to manual labour, to 

 strangle intellectual progress by permitting scientific inquiry 

 only to such as might succeed in convincing a committee of 

 ignorant workmen that their discoveries were likely to be 

 practically useful, to smother all individualism under a social 

 tyranny more absolute than the Hindu despotism of caste ; 

 this desire, it is obvious, is simply the abnormal desire to 



