ive or
social ends, and of interspecific competition to co-operative,
association."[257] Experience shows, according to Geddes, that the
types which are fittest to surmount great obstacles are not so much
those who engage in the fiercest competitive struggle for existence,
as those who contrive to temper it. From all these observations there
resulted, along with a limitation of Darwinian pessimism, some
encouragement for the aspirations of the collectivists.

And Darwin himself would, doubtless, have subscribed to these
rectifications. He never insisted, like his rival, Wallace, upon the
necessity of the solitary struggle of creatures in a state of nature,
each for himself and against all. On the contrary, in _The Descent of
Man_, he pointed out the serviceableness of the social instincts, and
corroborated Bagehot's statements when the latter, applying laws of
physics to politics, showed the great advantage societies derived from
intercourse and communion. Again, the theory of sexual evolution which
makes the evolution of types depend increasingly upon preferences,
judgments, mental factors, surely offers something to qualify what
seems hard and brutal in the theory of natural selection.

But, as often happens with disciples, the Darwinians had out-Darwined
Darwin. The extravagances of social Darwinism provoked a useful
reaction; and thus people were led to seek, even in the animal
kingdom, for facts of solidarity which would serve to justify humane
effort.

* * * * *

On quite another line, however, an attempt has been made to connect
socialist tendencies with Darwinian principles. Marx and Darwin have
been confronted; and writers have undertaken to show that the work of
the German philosopher fell readily into line with that of the English
naturalist and was a development of it. Such has been the endeavour of
Ferri in Italy and of Woltmann in Germany, not to mention others. The
founders of "scientific socialism" had, moreover, themselves thought
of this reconciliation. They make more than one allusion to Darwin in
works which appeared after 1859. And sometimes they use his theory to
define by contrast their own ideal. They remark that the capitalist
system, by giving free course to individual competition, ends indeed
in a _bellum omnium contra omnes_; and they make it clear that
Darwinism, thus understood, is as repugnant to them as to Duehring.

But it is at the scientific and not