, the
conditions of existence and the interests of the people in their
respective countries, in order to adapt their laws to them, laws
which--if this is not done--remain, as abundant examples show, dead
letters because the reality of the facts of life does not permit them to
strike their roots into the social soil and to develop a fruitful
life.[62]

On the subject of artificial social constructions, the socialists might
say to the individualists: let him who is without sin, cast the first
stone.

The true reply is wholly different. Scientific socialism represents a
much more advanced phase of socialist thought; it is in perfect harmony
with modern, experiential science, and it has completely abandoned the
fantastic idea of prophesying, at the present time, what human society
will be under the new collectivist organization.

What scientific socialism can affirm and does affirm with mathematical
certainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in
the general direction pointed out and foreseen by socialism, that is to
say, in the direction of a continuously and progressively increasing
preponderance of the interests and importance of the species over the
interests and importance of the individual--and, therefore, in the
direction of a continuous _socialization_ of the economic life, and with
and in consequence of that, of the juridical, moral and political life.

As to the petty details of the new social edifice, we are unable to
foresee them, precisely because the new social edifice will be, and is,
a _natural_ and _spontaneous_ product of human evolution, a product
which is already in process of formation, and the general outlines of
which are already visible, and not an artificial construction of the
imagination of some utopian or idealist.

The situation is the same in the social sciences and the natural
sciences. In embryology the celebrated law of Haeckel tells us that the
development of the _individual_ embryo reproduces in miniature the
various forms of development of the animal _species_ which have preceded
it in the zoological series. But the biologist, by studying a human
embryo of a few days' or a few weeks' growth, can not tell whether it
will be male or female, and still less whether it will be a strong or a
weak individual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not.

He can only tell the general lines of the future evolution of that
individual, and must leave it to time to show