AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY. 95 



it, as well as taste and vocation. Hence I neither 

 shall play any political part in the future, nor have I 

 hitherto made any attempt of the kind. Though here 

 and there I have occasionally uttered a political 

 opinion, or have made a political application of some 

 theory of natural science, these subjective opinions 

 have no objective value. In point of fact I have by 

 so doing overstepped the limits of my competence, just 

 as Virchow has by going into questions of zoology and 

 particularly that of the transformation of apes : I am 

 a layman in political practice, as Virchow is in the 

 province of zoological hypothesis. Moreover, such 

 success as Virchow has attained during the twenty 

 years of his painful, wearisome, and exhausting acti- 

 vity as a politician does not, in truth, make me pine 

 for such laurels. 



But this at least I, as a theoretical naturalist, may 

 demand of practical politicians, that in utilising our 

 theories for political ends they should first make them- 

 selves exactly acquainted with them ; they then, for 

 the future, would forbear drawing conclusions from 

 them, the very opposite to those which ought reasonably 

 to be inferred. Misunderstandings would never thus 

 be wholly avoided, it is true, but what doctrine is 

 universally secure against misunderstanding ? And 

 from what theory, however sound and true, may not 

 the most unsound and frantic inferences be drawn ? 



