CHAPTER XII. 



EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, INDIVIDUAL 

 VIOLENCE, SOCIALISM, AND ANARCHY. 



The last and gravest of the contradictions 

 which it is claimed are to be found between 

 socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, 

 is involved in the question how practical 

 socialism will be realised. Some think that 

 socialism ought to make known from now 

 in all its details the precise and symmetrical 

 framework of positive social organisation. 

 " Give me a practical description of the new 

 society and I will then decide if I should 

 prefer it to the present society." 



Others and it is a consequence of this first 

 false conception imagine that socialism 

 wishes to change in a day the face of the 

 world, and that having gone to sleep in a 

 complete bourgeois world, we shall waken 

 next day in a complete socialist world. 



How is it not seen, we then say, that all 

 this clashes absolutely with the law of evolu- 

 tion, whose two fundamental ideas which 

 characterise the new direction of positive 

 thought, and which oppose to it the old meta- 

 physics are precisely the natural and gradual 

 growth of all phenomena in all the domains 

 of the life of Jhe universe from astronomy to 

 sociology. 



It is indisputable that these two objections 



