He believes that he has thus demonstrated that I was mistaken when I declared that the species is the sole eternal reality of life and that the individual—­himself a biological aggregation—­does not live alone and by himself alone, but only by virtue of the fact that he forms a part of a collectivity, to which he owes all the creative conditions of his material, moral and intellectual existence.

In truth, if M. Garofalo had employed such arguments to expose the absurdities of metaphysical penology, and to defend the heresies of the positive school, the latter would certainly not number him among its most eloquent and suggestive founders and champions.

* * * * *

And yet, M. Garofalo, instead of repeating these soporific banalities, ought to have been able to discuss seriously the fundamental thesis of socialism, which, through the social ownership of the land and the means of production, tends to assure to every individual the conditions of an existence more worthily human, and of a full and perfectly free development of his physical and moral personality.  For then only, when the daily bread of the body and mind is guaranteed, will every man be able, as Goethe said, “to become that which he is,” instead of wasting and wearing himself out in the spasmodic and exhausting struggle for daily bread, obtained too often at the expense of personal dignity or the sacrifice of intellectual aptitudes, while human energies are obviously squandered to the great disadvantage of the entire society, and all this with the appearance of personal liberty, but, in fact, with the vast majority of mankind reduced to dependence upon the class in possession of economic monopoly.

But M. Garofalo has altogether refrained from these discussions, which admit of scientific arguments on either hand.  He has confined himself, on the contrary, even when he has attempted to discuss seriously, to the repetition of the most superficial commonplaces.

Thus, for example (page 92), opposing the socialists who maintain that the variations of the social environment will inevitably bring about a change in individual aptitudes and activities, he writes:  “But the world can not change, if men do not first begin by transforming themselves under the influence of those two ideal factors:  honor and duty.”

That is the same as saying that a man must not jump into the water ... unless he has learned beforehand to swim, while remaining on land.

Nothing, on the contrary, is more in harmony with the scientific inductions of biology and sociology than the socialist idea, according to which changes in the environment cause correlative changes, both physiological and psychical, in individuals.  The soul of Darwinism, is it not wholly in the variability, organic and functional, of individuals and species, under the modifying influence of the environment, fixed and transmitted by natural selection?  And neo-Darwinism itself, does it not consist wholly in the constantly increasing importance attributed to the changes in the environment as explanations of the variations of living beings?