8o 



Scientific socialism maintains, on the con- 

 trary, that the laws established by classic, 

 political economy, since Adam Smith, are 

 laws suitable to the present historic period of 

 the civilised world, that consequently they are 

 laws essentially relative to the [time in which 

 they have been analysed ; further, that just 

 as they no longer correspond with the facts if 

 one wishes to extend them to the historic past, 

 and still more to pre-historic and ante-historic 

 times, so they cannot have a claim to petrify 

 the social future. 



Of these two fundamental arguments, the 

 orthodox argument and the socialist 

 argument, which is the one that best accords 

 with the scientific theory of universal 

 evolution ? 



The answer cannot be doubtful. 



The theory of evolution of which Herbert 

 Spencer is the real author, in applying to 

 sociology the relativist tendency which the 

 historic school had followed in the study of 

 law and politics (already heterodox on more 

 than one point), has shown that everything 

 changes, that the present, in the astronomical, 

 geological, biological, sociological order, is 

 only the resultant of many thousand trans- 

 formations, natural, necessary, incessant 

 that the present differs from the past, and that 

 the future will certainly be different from the 

 present. 



Spencerism has done nothing but bring an 

 enormous number of scientific proofs in all 

 branches of human knowledge to these two 

 abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel : 



