f the sociological or socialist
tendency of modern scientific thought in the face of the exaggerated
individualism inherited from the last century.

Modern biology also demonstrates that it is necessary to avoid the
opposite excess--into which certain schools of utopian socialism and of
communism fall--the excess of regarding only the interests of Society
and altogether neglecting the individual. An other biological law shows
us, in fact, that the existence of the aggregation is the resultant of
the life of all the individuals, just as the existence of an individual
is the resultant of the life of its constituent cells.

We have demonstrated that the socialism which characterizes the end of
the nineteenth century and which will illumine the dawn of the coming
century is in perfect harmony with the entire current of modern thought.
This harmony manifests itself even on the fundamental question of the
predominance given to the vital necessity of collective or social
solidarity over the dogmatic exaggerations of individualism, and if the
latter at the close of the last century was the outward sign of a potent
and fruitful awakening, it inevitably leads, through the pathological
manifestations of unbridled competition, to the "libertarian" explosions
of anarchism which preaches "individual action," and which is entirely
oblivious of human and social solidarity.

We now come to the last point of contact and essential oneness that
there is between Darwinism and socialism.

FOOTNOTES:

[35] _Sociologie criminelle_, French trans., Paris, 1892.

[36] I cannot consider here the recent attempt at eclecticism made by M.
Fouillee and others. M. Fouillee wishes to oppose, or at least to add,
to the _naturalistic_ conception of society the consensual or
_contractual_ conception. Evidently, since no theory is absolutely
false, there is even in this consensual theory a share of truth, and the
liberty of emigration may be an instance of it--as long as this liberty
is compatible with the economic interests of the class in power. But,
obviously, this consent, which does not exist at the birth of each
individual into such or such a society (and this fact of birth is the
most decisive and tyrannical factor in life) also has very little to do
with the development of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated as they
are by the iron law of the economic and political organization in which
he is an atom.

VIII.

THE "STRUGGLE FOR LI