474. Darwinism and Sociology 
that the types which are fittest to surmount great obstacles are not 
so much those who engage in the fiercest competitive struggle for 
existence, as those who contrive to temper it. From all these observa- 
tions there resulted, along with a limitation of Darwinian pessimism, 
some encouragement for the aspirations of the collectivists. 
And Darwin himself would, doubtless, have subscribed to these 
rectifications. He never insisted, like his rival, Wallace, upon the 
necessity of the solitary struggle of creatures in a state of nature, 
each for himself and against all. On the contrary, in The Descent of 
Man, he pointed out the serviceableness of the social instincts, and 
corroborated Bagehot’s statements when the latter, applying laws of 
physics to politics, showed the great advantage societies derived from 
intercourse and communion. Again, the theory of sexual evolution 
which makes the evolution of types depend increasingly upon prefer- 
ences, judgments, mental factors, surely offers something to qualify 
what seems hard and brutal in the theory of natural selection. 
But, as often happens with disciples, the Darwinians had out- 
Darwined Darwin. The extravagancies of social Darwinism provoked 
a useful reaction; and thus people were led to seek, even in the 
animal kingdom, for facts of solidarity which would serve to justify 
humane effort. 
On quite another line, however, an attempt has been made to 
connect socialist tendencies with Darwinian principles. Marx and 
Darwin have been confronted ; and writers have undertaken to show 
that the work of the German philosopher fell readily into line with 
that of the English naturalist and was a development of it. Such has 
been the endeavour of Ferri in Italy and of Woltmann in Germany, 
not to mention others. The founders of “scientific socialism” had, 
moreover, themselves thought of this reconciliation. They make more 
than one allusion to Darwin in works which appeared after 1859. 
And sometimes they use his theory to define by contrast their own 
ideal. They remark that the capitalist system, by giving free course 
to individual competition, ends indeed in a bellum omnium contra 
omnes ; and they make it clear that Darwinism, thus understood, is 
as repugnant to them as to Diihring. 
But it is at the scientific and not at the moral point of view that 
they place themselves when they connect their economic history with 
Darwin’s work. Thanks to this unifying hypothesis, they claim to 
have constructed—as Marx does in his preface to Das Kapital—a 
veritable natural history of social evolution. Engels speaks in 
praise of his friend Marx as having discovered the true mainspring 
of history hidden under the veil of idealism and sentimentalism, and 
as having proclaimed in the primwm vivere the inevitableness of 
