Socialism and Modern Science | Page 8

the

shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich Cimabue, he must
inevitably vanish in oblivion in the great prison of wage-slavery, and
society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual power.[11]
He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to no personal
exertion, even if his mental capacity is below normal, will play a
leading role on the stage of life's theatre, and all servile people will
heap praise and flattery upon him, and he will imagine, simply because
he has money, that he is quite a different person from what in reality he
is.[12]
When property shall have become collective, that is to say, under the
socialist regime, every one will be assured of the means of existence,
and the daily labor will simply serve to give free play to the special
aptitudes, more or less original, of each individual, and the best and
most fruitful (potentially) years of life will not be completely taken up,
as they are at present, by the grievous and tragic battle for daily bread.
Socialism will assure to every one a human life; it will give each
individual true liberty to manifest and develop his or her own physical
and intellectual individuality--individualities which they bring into the
world at birth and which are infinitely varied and unequal. Socialism
does not deny inequality; it merely wishes to utilize this inequality as
one of the factors leading to the free, prolific and many-sided
development of human life.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] J. De Johannis, _Il concetto dell'equaglianza nel socialismo e nella
scienza, in Rassegna delle scienza sociali_, Florence, March 15, 1883,
and more recently, Huxley, "On the Natural Inequality of Men," in the
"Nineteenth Century," January, 1890.
[4] Utopian socialism has bequeathed to us as a mental habit, a habit
surviving even in the most intelligent disciples of Marxian socialism, of
asserting the existence of certain equalities--the equality of the two
sexes, for example--assertions which cannot possibly be maintained.

BEBEL, Woman in the Past, Present and Future.
Bebel, the propagandist and expounder of Marxian theories, also
repeats this assertion that, from the psycho-physiological point of view,
woman is the equal of man, and he attempts to refute, without success,
the scientific objections that have been made to this thesis.
Since the scientific investigations of Messrs. Lombroso and Ferrero,
embodied in Donna delinquente, prostituta e normale, Turin, 1893
(This book has been translated into English, if my memory serves me
right.--Tr.), one can no longer deny the physiological and psychological
inferiority of woman to man. I have given a Darwinian explanation of
this fact (Scuola positiva, 1893, Nos. 7-8), that Lombroso has since
completely accepted (Uomo di genio, 6e édit, 1894. This book is also
available in English, I believe.--Tr.) I pointed out that all the
physio-psychical characteristics of woman are the consequences of her
great biological function, maternity.
A being who creates another being--not in the fleeting moment of a
voluptuous contact, but by the organic and psychical sacrifices of
pregnancy, childbirth and giving suck--cannot preserve for herself as
much strength, physical and mental, as man whose only function in the
reproduction of the species is infinitely less of a drain.
And so, aside from certain individual exceptions, woman has a lower
degree of physical sensibility than man (the current opinion is just the
opposite), because if her sensibility were greater, she could not,
according to the Darwinian law, survive the immense and repeated
sacrifices of maternity, and the species would become extinct.
Woman's intellect is weaker, especially in synthetic power, precisely
because though there are no (Sergi, in _Atti della societa romana di
antropologia_, 1894) women of genius, they nevertheless give birth to
men of genius.
This is so true that greater sensibility and power of intellect are found
in women in whom the function and sentiment of maternity are
undeveloped or are only slightly developed (women of genius generally
have a masculine physiognomy), and many of them attain their

complete intellectual development only after they pass the critical
period of life during which the maternal functions cease finally.
But, if it is scientifically certain that woman represents an inferior
degree of biological evolution, and that she occupies a station, even as
regards her physio-psychical characteristics, midway between the child
and the adult male, it does not follow from this that the socialist
conclusions concerning the woman question are false.
Quite the contrary. Society ought to place woman, as a human being
and as a creatress of men--more worthy therefore of love and
respect--in a better juridical and ethical situation than she enjoys at
present. Now she is too often a beast of burden or an object of luxury.
In the same way when, from the economic point of view, we demand at
the present day special measures in behalf of women, we simply take
into