ific
thought.

Feeling and thought are the two inseparable impelling forces of the
individual life and of the collective life.

Socialism, which was still, but a few years since, at the mercy of the
strong and constantly recurring but undisciplined fluctuations of
humanitarian sentimentalism, has found, in the work of that great man,
Karl Marx, and of those who have developed and completed his thought,
its scientific and political guide.[1] This is the explanation of every
one of its conquests.

Civilization is the most fruitful and most beautiful development of
human energies, but it contains also an infectious _virus_ of tremendous
power. Beside the splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial
achievements, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, poverty,
misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and moral suicide, _i. e._
servility.

Pessimism--that sad symptom of a life without ideals and, in part, the
effect of the exhaustion or even of the degeneration of the nervous
system--glorifies the final annihilation of all life and sensation as
the only mode of escaping from or triumphing over pain and suffering.

We have faith, on the contrary, in the eternal _virtus medicatrix
naturae_ (healing power of Nature), and socialism is precisely that
breath of a new and better life which will free humanity--after some
access of fever perhaps--from the noxious products of the present phase
of civilization, and which, in a more advanced phase, will give a new
power and opportunity of expansion to all the healthy and fruitful
energies of all human beings.

ENRICO FERRI.

Rome, June, 1894.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The word in the original means a mariner's compass.--_Tr._

SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE.

PART FIRST.

I.

VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH.

On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated
embryologist of Jena, delivered at the Congress of Naturalists, which
was held at Munich, an eloquent address defending and propagating
Darwinism, which was at that time the object of the most bitter
polemical attacks.

A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,--an active member
of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in
politics just as much as in science--violently assailed the Darwinian
theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment,
hurled against it this