Socialism and Modern Science | Page 2

Spencerian, as I am, it is my intention to
demonstrate that Marxian Socialism--the only socialism which has a
truly scientific method and value, and therefore the only socialism
which from this time forth has power to inspire and unite the Social
Democrats throughout the civilized world--is only the practical and
fruitful fulfilment, in the social life, of that modern scientific revolution
which--inaugurated some centuries since by the rebirth of the
experimental method in all branches of human knowledge--has
triumphed in our times, thanks to the works of Charles Darwin and
Herbert Spencer.
It is true that Darwin and especially Spencer halted when they had
travelled only half way toward the conclusions of a religious, political
or social order, which necessarily flow from their indisputable premises.
But that is, as it were, only an individual episode, and has no power to
stop the destined march of science and of its practical consequences,
which are in wonderful accord with the necessities--necessities
enforced upon our attention by want and misery--of contemporary life.
This is simply one more reason why it is incumbent upon us to render
justice to the scientific and political work of Karl Marx which
completes the renovation of modern scientific thought.
Feeling and thought are the two inseparable impelling forces of the
individual life and of the collective life.
Socialism, which was still, but a few years since, at the mercy of the
strong and constantly recurring but undisciplined fluctuations of
humanitarian sentimentalism, has found, in the work of that great man,
Karl Marx, and of those who have developed and completed his
thought, its scientific and political guide.[1] This is the explanation of

every one of its conquests.
Civilization is the most fruitful and most beautiful development of
human energies, but it contains also an infectious virus of tremendous
power. Beside the splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial
achievements, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, poverty,
misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and moral suicide, i. e.
servility.
Pessimism--that sad symptom of a life without ideals and, in part, the
effect of the exhaustion or even of the degeneration of the nervous
system--glorifies the final annihilation of all life and sensation as the
only mode of escaping from or triumphing over pain and suffering.
We have faith, on the contrary, in the eternal _virtus medicatrix
naturae_ (healing power of Nature), and socialism is precisely that
breath of a new and better life which will free humanity--after some
access of fever perhaps--from the noxious products of the present phase
of civilization, and which, in a more advanced phase, will give a new
power and opportunity of expansion to all the healthy and fruitful
energies of all human beings.
ENRICO FERRI.
Rome, June, 1894.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The word in the original means a mariner's compass.--Tr.
SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE.

PART FIRST.

I.

VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH.
On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated
embryologist of Jena, delivered at the Congress of Naturalists, which
was held at Munich, an eloquent address defending and propagating
Darwinism, which was at that time the object of the most bitter
polemical attacks.
A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,--an active
member of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories
in politics just as much as in science--violently assailed the Darwinian
theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment,
hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political anathema: "Darwinism
leads directly to socialism."
The German Darwinians, and at their head Messrs. Oscar Schmidt and
Haeckel, immediately protested; and, in order to avert the addition of
strong political opposition to the religious, philosophical, and
biological opposition already made to Darwinism, they maintained, on
the contrary, that the Darwinian theory is in direct, open and absolute
opposition to socialism.
"If the Socialists were prudent," wrote Oscar Schmidt in the "Ausland"
of November 27, 1877, "they would do their utmost to kill, by silent
neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory most emphatically
proclaims that the socialist ideas are impracticable."
"As a matter of fact," said Haeckel,[2] "there is no scientific doctrine
which proclaims more openly than the theory of descent that the
equality of individuals, toward which socialism tends, is an
impossibility; that this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction
with the necessary and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals.
"Socialism demands for all citizens equal rights, equal duties, equal
possessions and equal enjoyments; the theory of descent establishes, on
the contrary, that the realization of these hopes is purely and simply
impossible; that, in human societies, as in animal societies, neither the
rights, nor the duties, nor the possessions, nor the enjoyments of all the

members of a society are or ever can be equal.
"The great law of variation teaches--both in the general theory of