Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) — Themes and Context

nd in which he avowed that "since the age of forty years, his scientific studies had led him to atheism."

(See also, "Charles Darwin and Karl Marx: A Comparison," by Ed. Aveling. Published by the Twentieth Century Press, London.--Translator.)

In the same way, John Stuart Mill never declared himself a Socialist, but that, nevertheless, in opinion he was one, is made evident by his autobiography and his posthumous fragments on Socialism. (See "The Socialism of John Stuart Mill." Humboldt Pub. Co., New York.--Tr.)

[27] ARDIGÒ, _La Formazione naturale_, Vol. II. of his _Opere filologiche_, and Vol. VI., _La Ragione_, Padone, 1894.

[28] Guyau, _L'Irréligion de l'avenir_. Paris. 1887.

[29] The dominant factor, nevertheless, in religious beliefs, is the hereditary or traditional _sentimental_ factor; this it is which always renders them respectable when they are professed in good faith, and often makes them even appeal to our sympathies,--and this is precisely because of the ingenuous or refined sensibility of the persons in whom religious faith is the most vital and sincere.

[30] NITTI, _Le Socialisme catholique_, Paris, 1894, p. 27 and 393.

[31] Its usual form in America.--Translator.

[32] _Nuova Rassegna_, August, 1894.

[33] SERGI, _L'origine dei fenomeni psichici e loro significazione biologica_, Milan, 1885, p. 334, _et seq._

[34] DURKHEIM, _De la division du travail social_. Paris. 1893. As regards the pretended influence of religion on personal morality I have shown how very slight a foundation there was for this opinion in my studies on criminal psychology, and more particularly in _Omicidio nell' antropologia criminale_.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES.

It can also be shown that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by an examination of the different modes of conceiving of the individual in relation to the species.

The eighteenth century closed with the exclusive glorification of the individual, of the _man_--as an entity in himself. In the works of Rousseau this was only a beneficent, though exaggerated re-action against the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages.

This individualism led directly to that artificiality in politics, which I will consider a little further on in studying the relations between the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic anarchists,--since both alike imagine that the social organization can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,--more or less murderous.

Modern biology has radically changed this conception of the _individual_ and it has demonstrated, in the domain of biology as in that of sociology, that the individual is himself only an aggregation of more simple living elements, and likewise that the individual in himself, the _Selbstwesen_ of the Germans, does not exist in independent isolation, but only as a member of a society (_Gliedwesen_).

Every living object is an association, a collectivity.

The monad itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of biological individuality, is also an aggregate of various parts (nucleus, _nucléole_, protoplasm), and each one of them in its turn is an aggregate of molecules which are aggregates of atoms.

The atom does not exist alone, as an individual; the atom is invisible and impalpable and it does not live.

And the complexity of the aggregation, the federation of the parts constantly increases with the ascent in the zoological series from protozoa to Man.

Unifying, Jacobin artificiality corresponds to the metaphysics of individualism, just as the conception of national and international federalism corresponds to the scientific character of modern socialism.

The organism of a mammal is simply a federation of tissues, organs and anatomical machinery; the organism of a society can consist of nothing but a federation of communes, provinces and regions; the organism of humanity can be nothing but a federation of nations.

If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head should have to move in the same fashion as the extremities and all of whose extremities would have to perform the same motions simultaneously, there is no less absurdity in a political and administrative organization in which the extreme northern province or the mountainous province, for instance, have to have the same bureaucratic machinery, the same body of laws, the same methods, etc., as the extreme southern province or the province made up of plains, solely through the passion for symmetrical uniformity, that pathological expression of unity.

If we disregard those considerations of a political order which make it possible to conclude, as I have done elsewhere,[35] that the only possible organization for Italy, as for every other country, appeared to me to be that of an administrative federalism combined with political unity, we can regard it as manifest, that at the close of the nineteenth century the individual, as an independent entity, is dethroned alike in biology and sociology.