e
able, as Goethe said, "to become that which he is," instead of wasting
and wearing himself out in the spasmodic and exhausting struggle for
daily bread, obtained too often at the expense of personal dignity or
the sacrifice of intellectual aptitudes, while human energies are
obviously squandered to the great disadvantage of the entire society,
and all this with the appearance of personal liberty, but, in fact, with
the vast majority of mankind reduced to dependence upon the class in
possession of economic monopoly.

But M. Garofalo has altogether refrained from these discussions, which
admit of scientific arguments on either hand. He has confined himself,
on the contrary, even when he has attempted to discuss seriously, to the
repetition of the most superficial commonplaces.

Thus, for example (page 92), opposing the socialists who maintain that
the variations of the social environment will inevitably bring about a
change in individual aptitudes and activities, he writes: "But the world
can not change, if men do not first begin by transforming themselves
under the influence of those two ideal factors: honor and duty."

That is the same as saying that a man must not jump into the water ...
unless he has learned beforehand to swim, while remaining on land.

Nothing, on the contrary, is more in harmony with the scientific
inductions of biology and sociology than the socialist idea, according
to which changes in the environment cause correlative changes, both
physiological and psychical, in individuals. The soul of Darwinism, is
it not wholly in the variability, organic and functional, of individuals
and species, under the modifying influence of the environment, fixed and
transmitted by natural selection? And neo-Darwinism itself, does it not
consist wholly in the constantly increasing importance attributed to
the changes in the environment as explanations of the variations of
living beings?

And, in the realm of sociology, just as, according to the repeated and
unquestioned demonstrations of Spencer, in the passage of human
societies from the military type to the industrial type--as Saint-Simon
had already pointed out--a change, a process of adaptation, also takes
place in that "human nature" which the anti-socialists would have us
believe is a fixed and immutable thing, like the "created species" of
old-school biology; in the same way, in the gradual transition to a
collectivist organization, human nature will nece