170 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



Bateson so accurately described to us as furnishing 

 only one universal motive of action, namely, that 

 which drives him in the struggle with somebody else 

 for the possession of property. 



And when we turn from Marx's programme of 

 socialism in the pages of Kapital to Professor Karl 

 Pearson's programme of socialism in the Ethic of 

 Free Thought, it continues still to be the same 

 spirit. Professor Pearson draws in academic 

 seclusion in England the picture of his new order 

 of society under socialism. And then the frantic 

 heredity of the fighting male of the West takes 

 possession of his soul. To those who offend against 

 the laws of public property in Professor Pearson's 

 new order of society it is to be, to use his actual 

 words before quoted, " short shrift and the nearest 

 lamp-post." The rules of the Kriegsbrauch im 

 Landkriege could hardly furnish a more character- 

 istic example of the spirit of the Darwinian man. 

 The self -stultification of the West is, in short, as 

 complete and as absolute at the hands of the 

 socialistic Professor in England as Tolstoy con- 

 sidered it to be at the hands of the Christian 

 Emperor in Germany. And the tragic irony of it 

 is that, in this case also, Tolstoy would have had 

 equal cause for saying that persons of culture, 

 liberals, even the fellow-men of free thought 



