GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 65 



superman translated into the national policy of the 

 superstate aiming at world power. Through all 

 the many phases of the movement there ran the 

 same dominating note of intensive self-assertion, 

 the same fundamental conception of the supremacy 

 of force. " Life exists for Me. All the dim aeons 

 behind have toiled to produce Me. I am the 

 Fittest. Give Me My Rights. Stand clear of My 

 way. I want and I will have." 1 



All this was in Germany. But in the ultra- 

 democratic State as represented in England, France, 

 and the United States the development of Darwin'* 

 ideas took on different but even more surprising 

 forms. In the article on Sociology in the current 

 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica I have 

 dealt with some of these phases. As early as 1860, 

 the year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of 

 Species, Herbert Spencer published in England his 

 famous article on the Social Organism. The article 

 contained the central idea around which Spencer 

 afterwards constructed his system of Synthetic 

 Philosophy, the principal books of which have been 

 translated into every leading language of the West. 



Nothing has ever existed in the world or will ever 

 exist therein like the social organism which Spencer 

 conceived in this essay. For the characteristic 



1 Harold Begbic, op. cit. 

 5 



