CHAPTER VI. 



THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES. 



We can again show that scientific socialism 

 proceeds directly from Darwinism by 

 examining the different modes of conceiving 

 the individual in relation to the species. 



The eighteenth century finished with the 

 exclusive glorification of the individual^ of 

 the man as an entity in himself. In the 

 works of Rosseau this was only a beneficent 

 excess of reaction from the political and 

 sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages. 



This individualism has created, as a direct 

 consequence, a political artificialism with 

 which I shall occupy myself later in studying 

 the relations of the theory of evolution and of 

 socialism, and which is common to the govern- 

 ors in the bourgeois regime and to individual- 

 ist anarchists because they both imagine that 

 the social organisation can be changed in a 

 day by the magical effect of a clause of a 

 law or by a bomb more or less murderous. 



Modern biology has radically changed this 

 conception of the individual, and it has shown 

 in the domain of biology as in that of sociol- 

 ogy that the individual is himself only an 

 aggregate of more simple living elements, and 

 at the same time that the individual in him- 

 self, the Selbstwesen of the Germans, does not 

 exist in himself but only as far as he is a 

 member of a society (Gliedwesen). 



