COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



torical 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 commonly known as com- 

 munistic, 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 pos- 

 sibility of any industrial integration, to abolish 

 the incentives which make man sow to-day that 

 he may reap in the future, to destroy social dif- 

 ferentiation 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 ab- 

 solute than the Hindu despotism of caste ; this 

 desire, it is obvious, is simply the abnormal de- 

 sire to undo every one of the things in the doing 

 of which we have seen that social evolution con- 

 sists. It is, in short, the theory of Rousseau 



