The theory of evolution, of which Herbert Spencer was the true creator, by applying to sociology the tendency to relativism which the historical school had followed in its studies in law and political economy (even then heterodox on more than one point), has shown that everything changes; that the present phase—­of the facts in astronomy, geology, biology and sociology—­is only the resultant of thousands on thousands of incessant, inevitable, natural transformations; that the present differs from the past and that the future will certainly be different from the present.

Spencerism has done nothing but to collate a vast amount of scientific evidence, from all branches of human knowledge, in support of these two abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel:  “The present is the child of the past, but it is the parent of the future,” and “Nothing is; everything is becoming.”  This demonstration had already been made in the case of geology by Lyell who substituted for the traditional catastrophic theory of cataclysmic changes, the scientific theory of the gradual and continuous transformation of the earth.[46]

It is true that, notwithstanding his encyclopaedic knowledge, Herbert Spencer has not made a really profound study of political economy, or that at least he has not furnished us the evidence of the facts to support his assertions in this field as he has done in the natural sciences.  This does not alter the fact, however, that socialism is, after all, in its fundamental conception only the logical application of the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena.

It was Karl Marx who, in 1859 in his Critique de l’economie politique, and even before then, in 1847, in the famous Manifesto written in collaboration with Engels, nearly ten years before Spencer’s First Principles, and finally in Capital (1867) supplemented, or rather completed, in the social domain, the scientific revolution begun by Darwin and Spencer.

The old metaphysics conceived of ethics—­law—­economics—­as a finished compilation of absolute and eternal laws.  This is the conception of Plato.  It takes into consideration only historical times and it has, as an instrument of research, only the fantastic logic of the school-men.  The generations which preceded us, have all been imbued with this notion of the absoluteness of natural laws, the conflicting laws of a dual universe of matter and spirit.  Modern science, on the contrary, starts from the magnificent synthetic conception of monism, that is to say, of a single substance underlying all phenomena—­matter and force being recognized as inseparable and indestructible, continuously evolving in a succession of forms—­forms relative to their respective times and places.  It has radically changed the direction of modern thought and directed it toward the grand idea of universal evolution.[47]

Ethics, law and politics are mere superstructures, effects of the economic structure; they vary with its variations, from one parallel (of latitude or longitude) to another, and from one century to another.