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of individual episodes, and form a grand and 

 fateful drama, determined consciously or 

 unconsciously, in its most intimate details 

 as in its catastrophes by economic conditions, 

 which form the physical and indispensable 

 basis of life, and by the struggle of the classes 

 to conquer and preserve the economic forces 

 on which all the others necessarily depend 

 political, juridical, and moral. 



I shall have an opportunity when studying 

 the relations of sociology and socialism of 

 speaking more at length of this great concep- 

 tion which is the imperishable glory of Marx 

 and which secures for him in sociology the 

 place that Darwin occupies in biology and 

 Spencer in natural philosophy. 



For the moment it is sufficient for me to note 

 a new point of contrast between Darwinism 

 and socialism. The expression, " struggle of 

 classes," so antipathetic at the first sound (and 

 I confess that I felt this impression when I 

 had not yet seized the scientific spirit of the 

 Marxian theory) gives us, if we understand it 

 exactly, the first law of human history and, 

 therefore, it alone can give us the certain 

 norm of the coming of the new phase of 

 evolution which socialism foresees and which 

 it endeavours to hasten. 



Struggle of the classes that is to say, that 

 human society like all other living organisms 

 is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a 

 number, more or less great, of individuals ; it 

 is, on the contrary, a living organism which 

 is the resultant of different parts and always 



