and ante-historic
times, so it is absurd to attempt to apply them to the future and thus
vainly try to petrify and perpetuate present social forms.

Of these two fundamental theses, the orthodox thesis and the socialist
thesis, which is the one which best agrees with the scientific theory of
universal evolution?

The answer can not be doubtful.[45]

The theory of evolution, of which Herbert Spencer was the true creator,
by applying to sociology the tendency to relativism which the historical
school had followed in its studies in law and political economy (even
then heterodox on more than one point), has shown that everything
changes; that the present phase--of the facts in astronomy, geology,
biology and sociology--is only the resultant of thousands on thousands
of incessant, inevitable, natural transformations; that the present
differs from the past and that the future will certainly be different
from the present.

Spencerism has done nothing but to collate a vast amount of scientific
evidence, from all branches of human knowledge, in support of these two
abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel: "The present is the child of
the past, but it is the parent of the future," and "Nothing is;
everything is becoming." This demonstration had already been made in the
case of geology by Lyell who substituted for the traditional
catastrophic theory of cataclysmic changes, the scientific theory of the
gradual and continuous transformation of the earth.[46]

It is true that, notwithstanding his encyclopaedic knowledge, Herbert
Spencer has not made a really profound study of political economy, or
that at least he has not furnished us the evidence of the _facts_ to
support his assertions in this field as he has done in the natural
sciences. This does not alter the fact, however, that socialism is,
after all, in its fundamental conception only the logical application of
the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena.

It was Karl Marx who, in 1859 in his _Critique de l'economie politique_,
and even before then, in 1847, in the famous _Manifesto_ written in
collaboration with Engels, nearly ten years before Spencer's _First
Principles_, and finally in _Capital_ (1867) supplemented, or rather
completed, in the social domain, the scientific revolution begun by
Darwin and Spencer.

The old metaphysics conceived of ethics--law--economics--as a finished
compilation of absolute and eternal laws. This is the concepti