Sentimental socialism has furnished some attempts at utopian construction, but the modern world of politics has presented and does present still more of them with the ridiculous and chaotic mess of laws and codes which surround every man from his birth to his death, and even before he is born and after he is dead, in an inextricable network of codes, laws, decrees and regulations which stifle him like the silk-worm in the cocoon.

And every day, experience shows us that our legislators, imbued with this political and social artificiality, do nothing but copy the laws of the most dissimilar peoples, according as the fashion comes from Paris or Berlin,—­instead of carefully studying the facts of actual life, the conditions of existence and the interests of the people in their respective countries, in order to adapt their laws to them, laws which—­if this is not done—­remain, as abundant examples show, dead letters because the reality of the facts of life does not permit them to strike their roots into the social soil and to develop a fruitful life.[62]

On the subject of artificial social constructions, the socialists might say to the individualists:  let him who is without sin, cast the first stone.

The true reply is wholly different.  Scientific socialism represents a much more advanced phase of socialist thought; it is in perfect harmony with modern, experiential science, and it has completely abandoned the fantastic idea of prophesying, at the present time, what human society will be under the new collectivist organization.

What scientific socialism can affirm and does affirm with mathematical certainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in the general direction pointed out and foreseen by socialism, that is to say, in the direction of a continuously and progressively increasing preponderance of the interests and importance of the species over the interests and importance of the individual—­and, therefore, in the direction of a continuous socialization of the economic life, and with and in consequence of that, of the juridical, moral and political life.

As to the petty details of the new social edifice, we are unable to foresee them, precisely because the new social edifice will be, and is, a natural and spontaneous product of human evolution, a product which is already in process of formation, and the general outlines of which are already visible, and not an artificial construction of the imagination of some utopian or idealist.

The situation is the same in the social sciences and the natural sciences.  In embryology the celebrated law of Haeckel tells us that the development of the individual embryo reproduces in miniature the various forms of development of the animal species which have preceded it in the zoological series.  But the biologist, by studying a human embryo of a few days’ or a few weeks’ growth, can not tell whether it will be male or female, and still less whether it will be a strong or a weak individual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not.