strange phenomenon consists not only in the fact
that, as Malagodi said,[77] sociology is still in the period of
scientific _analysis_ and not yet in that of _synthesis_, but especially
in the fact that the logical consequences of Darwinism and of scientific
evolutionism applied to the study of human society lead inexorably to
socialism, as I have demonstrated in the foregoing pages.

FOOTNOTE:

[77] MALAGODI, _Il Socialismo e la scienza_. In _Critica Sociale_, Aug.
1, 1892.

XIV.

MARX COMPLETES DARWIN AND SPENCER. CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS.

To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically formulated these
logical applications of experiential science to the domain of social
economy. Beyond doubt, the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in
his writings, with a multitude of technical details and of apparently
dogmatic formulae, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES
of Spencer, and are not the luminous passages on _evolution_ in it
surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the
unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to
consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to
oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles
Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three Titans of the scientific
revolution which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh
potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of the nineteenth
century.

The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed in the domain of
social economy the revolution effected by science are in number three.

The first is the discovery of the law of surplus-labor. This law gives
us a scientific explanation of the accumulation of private property not
created by the labor of the accumulator; as this law has a more
peculiarly technical character, we will not lay further stress upon it
here, as we have given a general idea of it in the preceding pages.

The two other Marxian theories are more directly related to our
observations on scientific socialism, since they undoubtedly furnish us
the sure and infallible key to the life of society.

I allude, first, to the idea expressed by Marx, as long ago as 1859, in
his _Critique de l'economie politique_, that the economic phenomena form
the foundation and the determining conditions of all other human or
social manifestations, and that, consequently, ethics, law and politics
are only derivative phen