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 preferences,
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 Duhring.

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 primum vivere the inevitableness o