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of daily bread, too often at the expense of personal 

 dignity or intellectual aptitudes, in an evident squander- 

 ing of human forces to the great disadvantage of society 

 as a whole, and with the appearance of individual liberty, 

 but really with the submission of the large majority to 

 the class of the possessors of economic monopoly. 



But M. Garofalo has abstained altogether from these 

 discussions, where one can on both sides adduce scientific 

 arguments. Even when he tried to discuss seriously, he 

 did not go beyond the repetition of the most superficial 

 commonplaces. 



Thus, for example (page^ga), against the socialists who 

 maintain that the variations of the social environment 

 will determine necessarily a change in the individual 

 aptitudes and activities, he cries : "But the world cannot 

 change if men do not first begin to change themselves 

 under the influence of these two ideal factors : honour 

 and duty." 



That is to say, a man must not throw himself into the 

 water if he has not first learnt to swim whilst keeping 

 on the land. 



Nothing, on the contrary, is more conformable to the 

 positive inductions of biology and sociology than the 

 socialist idea, according to which the changes of the 

 environment determine the correlative changes, physio- 

 logical and psychical in individuals. Is not the whole 

 essence of Darwinism in the variability, organic and 

 functional, of individuals and species under the modify- 

 ing influence of the environment confirmed and trans- 

 mitted by natural selection? And neo-Darwinism itself, 

 is it not wholly devoted to the ever-increasing importance 

 given to the changes of the environment in order to 

 explain the variations of living creatures? 



And in the sociological order, following the repeated 

 and not suspected proofs of Spencer, in the passage from 

 the warlike type to the industrial type of human societies 

 which St. Simon had already pointed out just as this 

 human nature which anti-socialists put before us as 

 something immutable and fixed like the created species 

 of ancient biology, changes in adapting itself to the 

 change of type, so in the gradual passage to a collectivist 

 organisation, human nature will adapt itself necessarily 

 to the modified social conditions. 



Certainly human nature will not change in its funda- 

 mental tendencies. For example, men, like animals, will 

 always shun pain and seek pleasure, since the former is a 

 diminution and the latter an increase of life ; but this will 

 not hinder the fact that the application and direction of 

 these biological tendencies can and must change with the 

 changes of the environment. So that I have been able to 

 show elsewhere that individual egoism will certainly 

 always exist, but it will act in a profoundly different 



