66 



the population so that the desire to maintain 

 a given social order clashes against the pressure 

 of the people (described in our time as the 

 proletariat), and social evolution pursues its 

 inexorable and irresistible course. 



The conclusion of our discussion is that 

 whilst at the end of the i8th century it was 

 thought that society was made for the indi- 

 vidual and it could then be inferred that 

 millions of individuals might and ought to 

 work and suffer for the exclusive advantage of 

 a few other individuals ; at the end of the 

 igth century the positive sciences have proved 

 quite the contrary that it is the individual 

 who lives for the species, and that the latter 

 alone is the eternal reality of life. 



That is the point of departure of the 

 sociological or social tendency of modern 

 scientific thought as opposed to the exagger- 

 ated individualism left as an heritage by the 

 1 8th century. 



Biology shows also that we must not fall 

 into the opposite extreme as certain schools 

 of Utopian socialism and of communism have 

 done and only see society and completely 

 neglect the individual. Another biological 

 law shows us, in fact, that the existence of the 

 aggregate is the resultant of the life of all the 

 individuals, just as the existence of an indi- 

 vidual is the resultant of the life of the cells 

 of which it is composed. 



We have shown that the socialism which 

 characterises the end of the igth, and which 

 illumines the dawn of this century, is in perfect 



