s of production.

These are the conclusions to which we are led by the evidence of the
facts--facts verified by a scientific examination of the three principal
contradictions which our opponents have sought to set up between
socialism and scientific evolution.

From this point it is impossible not to see the direct causal connection
between Marxian socialism and scientific evolution, since it must be
recognized that the former is simply the logical consequence of the
application of the evolutionary theory to the domain of economics.

IX.

THE ORTHODOX THESIS AND THE SOCIALIST THESIS IN THE LIGHT OF THE
EVOLUTION THEORY.

What, in substance, is the message of socialism? That the present
economic world can not be immutable and eternal, that it merely
represents a transitory phase of social evolution and that an ulterior
phase, a differently organized world, is destined to succeed it.

That this new organization must be collectivist or socialist--and no
longer individualist--results, as an ultimate and certain conclusion,
from the examination we have made of Darwinism and socialism.

I must now demonstrate that this fundamental affirmation of
socialism--leaving out of consideration for the moment all the details
of that future organization, of which I will speak further on--is in
perfect harmony with the experiential theory of evolutionism.

Upon what point are orthodox political economy and socialism in absolute
conflict? Political economy has held and holds that the economic laws
governing the production and distribution of wealth which it has
established are _natural laws_ ... not in the sense that they are laws
naturally determined by the conditions of the social organism (which
would be correct), but that they are _absolute laws_, that is to say
that they apply to humanity at all times and in all places, and,
consequently, that they are immutable in their principal points, though
they may be subject to modification in details.[44]

Scientific socialism holds, on the contrary, that the laws established
by classical political economy, since the time of Adam Smith, are laws
peculiar to the present period in the history of civilized humanity, and
that they are, consequently, laws essentially _relative_ to the period
of their analysis and discovery, and that just as they no longer fit the
facts when the attempt is made to extend their application to past
historical epochs and, still more, to pre-historic