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But the fundamental fallacy, from which so many thinkers—­M.  Garofalo among them—­can not free themselves, and to which I myself yielded, before I had penetrated, thanks to the Marxian theory of historic materialism—­or, more exactly, of economic determinism—­into the true spirit of socialist sociology, is the tendency to judge the inductions of socialism by the biological, psychological and sociological data of the present society, without thinking of the necessary changes that will be effected by a different economic environment with its inevitable concomitants or consequences, different moral and political environments.

In M. Garofalo’s book we find once more this petitio principii which refuses to believe in the future in the name of the present, which is declared immutable.  It is exactly as if in the earliest geological epochs it had been concluded from the flora and fauna then existing that it was impossible for a fauna and flora ever to exist differing from them as widely as do the cryptogams from the conifers, or the mammalia from the mollusca.

This confirms, once more, the observation that I made before, that to deny the truth of scientific socialism is implicitly to deny that law of universal and eternal evolution, which is the dominant factor in all modern scientific thought.

On page 16, M. Garofalo predicts that with the triumph of socialism “we shall see re-appear upon earth the reign of irrational and brutal physical force, and that we shall witness, as happens every day in the lowest strata of the population, the triumph of the most violent men.”  And he repeats this on pages 209-210; but he forgets that, given the socialist premise of a better organized social environment, this brutality, which is the product of the present misery and lack of education, must necessarily gradually diminish, and at last disappear.

Now, the possibility of this improvement of the social environment, which socialism asserts, is a thesis that can be discussed; but when a writer, in order to deny this possibility, opposes to the future the effects of a present, whose elimination is the precise question at issue, he falls into that insidious fallacy which it is only necessary to point out to remove all foundation from his arguments.

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And it is as always by grace of this same fallacy that he is able to declare, on page 213, that under the socialist regime “the fine arts will be unable to exist.  It is easy to say, they will henceforth be exercised and cultivated for the benefit of the public.  Of what public?  Of the great mass of the people deprived of artistic education?” As if, when poverty is once eliminated and labor has become less exhausting for the popular classes, the comfort and economic security, which would result from this, would not be sure to develop in them also the taste for aesthetic pleasure, which they feel