Social Evolution 475 
the struggle for existence. Marx himself, in Das Kapital, indicated 
another analogy when he dwelt upon the importance of a general 
technology for the explanation of this psychology :—a history of 
tools which would be to social organs what Darwinism is to the 
organs of animal species. And the very importance they attach to 
tools, to apparatus, to machines, abundantly proves that neither 
Marx nor Engels were likely to forget the special characters which 
mark off the human world from the animal. The former always 
remains to a great extent an artificial world. Inventions change the 
face of its institutions. New modes of production revolutionise 
not only modes of government, but modes even of collective thought. 
Therefore it is that the evolution of society is controlled by laws 
special to it, of which the spectacle of nature offers no suggestion. 
If, however, even in this special sphere, it can still be urged that 
the evolution of the material conditions of society is in accord with 
Darwin’s theory, it is because the influence of the methods of produc- 
tion is itself to be explained by the incessant strife of the various 
classes with each other. So that in the end Marx, like Darwin, 
finds the source of all progress in struggle. Both are grandsons 
of Heraclitus :—dAcuos rarnp wavtov. It sometimes happens, in 
these days, that the doctrine of revolutionary socialism is contrasted 
as rude and healthy with what may seem to be the enervating 
tendency of “solidarist” philanthropy: the apologists of the doctrine 
then pride themselves above all upon their faithfulness to Darwinian 
principles. 
So far we have been mainly concerned to show the use that social 
philosophies have made of the Darwinian laws for practical purposes : 
in order to orientate society towards their ideals each school tries to 
show that the authority of natural science is on its side. But even 
in the most objective of theories, those which systematically make 
abstraction of all political tendencies in order to study the social 
reality in itself, traces of Darwinism are readily to be found. 
Let us take for example Durkheim’s theory of Division of Labour’. 
The conclusions he derives from it are that whenever professional 
specialisation causes multiplication of distinct branches of activity, 
we get organic solidarity—implying differences—substituted for 
mechanical solidarity, based upon likenesses. The umbilical cord, as 
Marx said, which connects the individual consciousness with the 
collective consciousness is cut. The personality becomes more and 
more emancipated. But on what does this phenomenon, so big with 
consequences, itself depend? The author goes to social morphology 
for the answer: it is, he says, the growing density of population 
which brings with it this increasing differentiation of activities. But, 
1 De la Division du Travail social, Paris, 1893. 
