Biology, in the hands of Herbert Spencer, showed us how all the species of plants and animals inhabiting our globe were able to develop, starting from a few very simple organisms that existed on the earth at the beginning; and Haeckel was able to draw a sketch of a likely genealogical tree of the difierent classes of animals, man included. This was already a great result; but it also became possible to lay a solid scientific foundation to the history of human customs, beliefs, and institutions — a knowledge the want of which was so much felt by the philosophers of the eighteenth century and called for by Augusta Comte. Now, the history of human societies, institutions and religions can be written from the point of view of adaptive Evolution, without having recourse to the metaphysical formulas of Hegel, and without resorting to " innate ideas," to revelation from above, or to Kant's " substances." We can reconstrue it without appealing to those formulas which were death to the spirit of research, and behind which the same ignorance was always hidden — the same old superstition, the same blind faith disguised under sonorous words.
Aided by the works of naturalists on the cme hand, and, on the other, by the works of Henry Maine and his followers, who applied the same inductive method to the study of primitive institutions and to the law codes that oiigiuaLcd from them.
Modem Science and. Anarchism. 27 it was possible during the last thirty years to put the history of human institutions on as firm a basis as the history of the development of any species of plants or animals.
Of course, it would be very unjust to forget the work that was already accomplished as early as the " thirties " of the nineteenth century by the school of Augustin Thierry in France, and that of Maurer and the " Germanists " in Germany, of which Kostomaroff, Byelayeif and so many others were the followers in Russia. The method of evolution had certainly been applied since the Encyclopaedists to the study of customs and institu- tions, as well as languages. But to obtain correct and really scientific results became possible only since men of science learned to treat the facts of history in the same way as naturalists examine the gradual development of the organs of a plant or that of a new species.
In their own day, the metaphysical formulas no doubt had helped the thinkers to make some approximate generalisations. They helped especially to rouse numbed minds. They stimulated thought by their sometimes poetical indications of the unity of Nature and its never-ceasing life. At a time when reaction was supreme, as it was in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the inductive generalisations of the Encyclo- paedists and their English and Scotch predecessors were nearly forgotten, and when it would have needed moral courage to speak of the unity of physical and " spiritual " nature in the face of triumphant mysticism — in those dark days the poetical con- ceptions of some French thinkers and the nebulous metaphysics of the Germans upheld at least the taste for generahsations.
But the generalisations of that time, being established either by the dialectic method or by means of a half-conscious induction, were on account of that despairingly vague. The first — the dialectic ones — were mostly based on naive assertions, similar to those made by Greeks in ancient days, when they affirmed that planets must travel through space along circles, because the circle is the most perfect curve. If the naive character of such assertions and the total absence of proofs did not strike everyone, it was only because it was concealed by the vagueness of the arguments and nebulous reasonings, as well as by an obscure and grotesquely heavy style. As to the second, i.e., those generalisations which had at their origin a semi-conscious induc- tion, they were always built upon a series of extremely limited observations — like the hasty generalisations of Weismann, built 28 Modeiii Science atuL Anarchism.
upon a very narrow basis of facts, which have caused some stir of late among our biologist contemporaries. The value of the hypothetical generalisations based upon such half-conscious induc- tion was easily exaggerated, and they were represented as indis- putable laws, while they were mere guesses, mere suppositions, or embryos of generalisations which needed to be subjected to the most elementary test by facts.
And finally, all these loose generalisations were expressed in a way so abstract and cloudy — as, for instance, the famous " thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" of Hegel — that they left the fullest liberty to draw from them the most arbitrary practical con- clusions. In fact, one could deduce from them (this was really done) the revolutionary spirit of Bakunin and the Dresden Revolution, the revolutionary Jacobinism of Marx, and the "Recognition of what exists," which led so many ''right wing" Hegelians to make " Peace with reality " — that is to say, to indulge in the glorification of autocracy. I hardly need mention here the economic errors into which the Marxists have lately fallen, owing to their predilection for the dialectic method and economic metaphysics, as against the study of the actual facts of economic life.
VJ. HERBERT SPENCER'S SYN^THETIC PHILOSOPHY.
When the study of Anthropology — i.e., the study of the physiological evolution of man and the growth of his institutions and religious beliefs — began to be caiiied on with the methods that are applied in all other natural sciences, it became possible at last to delineate in its essential outlines the history of mankind, and to do away with metaphysics which had obstructed till then the study of history, just as Biblical tradition had obstructed the progress of geology.
One might have thought, therefore, that wher. Herbert Spencer undertook in his turn the construction of a synthetic philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century, he would have done so without falling into the errors that had characterised the "Positive Politics" of Auguste Comte. And yet, even though Spencer's " Synthetic Philosophy " is a great step in advance (it does not lead to a religion or to a new form of worship), yet in its sociological part it contains fallacies quite as misleading as those that were embodied in Comte's Positive philosophy.
The fact is, that when Spencer came to the psychology of societies (after having admirably examined the substance of our knowledge in physical sciences, biology, and psychology), he did not remain faithful to his rigorous scientific method, and did not dare to face the consequences to which such a method would have brought him. Thus, to take one single example, Spencer fully recognised that land should never be private property; because the owner of the soil, profiting by his right to raise the land-rent, may hinder his fellow men from obtaining from the soil all they could get out of it by means of intensive culture;, or, he may keep the land uncultivated, waiting till its value be raised by the work of other people around him. Spencer readily recognised that such a system is noxious to society and full of dangers. But while recognising this as regards land, he did not venture to use the same argiunents as regards other accumulated riches, such as mines or docks, not to mention workshops and factories. In natural sciences he did not hesitate to come to opinions absolutely contrary to those that had been maintained for centuries under the influence of religious beliefs. But here he had not the courage to accept the logical concluBions of his own reasonings.
30 Modem Scievce and Anarchism.
Or else, to take another striking example, he loudly raised his voice against State interference with the life of society; he even gave to one of his works a title representing in itself a whole revolutionary programme: " The Man versus the State." But little by little, under cover of safeguarding the protective functions of the State, he entirely reconstructed the State as it exists to-day, with but few very timid limitations.
These contradictions and many others besides could, of course, be explained by the fact that Spencer planned the sociological part of his philosophy under the influence of the English Radical movement of the " forties," long before he had written that part which dealt with natural sciences. In fact, he published his "Social Statics" in 1851, that is to say, when the anthropo- logical study of human institutions was still in its infancy. But, be it as it may, the result was that, like Comte, Spencer did not undertake the study of human institutions as a naturalist, for their own sake, without preconceived ideas borrowed from other domains, outside science.
Moreover, as soon as he reached the philosophy of societies — that is. Sociology — Spencer began to adopt a new method, and a very treacherous one: the method of resemblances, or analogies, which he evidently did not resort to in his study of the facts of physical nature. The consequence was that this method allowed him to justify a mass of preconceived ideas. Altogether, up till now we have not yet a synthetic philosophy that would have been built up on the same foundation for both natural and sociological sciences.
It must also be said that for the comprehension of the primitive institutions of the savages — which represent a sub- stantial portion of all Sociology — Spencer was the least suited man. In this respect he even exaggerated a failing that is frequent with Englishmen: a want of understanding for the morals and customs of other nations. — " We English are Roman Law people, while the Irish are Common Law people; that is why we do not understand one another," I was told once by James Knowles, a very intelligent and well-informed man. — The misunderstanding is still greater when an Englishman has to deal with those who are described as " inferior races." This was Spencer's case. He was quite incapable of understanding the savage's respect for his tribe and tribe-iule; or the hero of an Icelandic saga, who considers "blood-revenge" as a holy duty; or the in nor life of a mediaeval city, which, though it was full of Modern Science and Anai-c/iisrn, 31 strife within, was nevertheless, and precisely for that reason, a life of wonderful progress. The conceptions of Right and Law which prevailed at those stages of civilisation Mrere entirely strange to Spencer: he saw nought but savagery, barbarism and cruelty in that life.
Besides — and this is perhaps even more important — Spencer, like Huxley and so many others, had completely misunderstood the real meaning of the "struggle for existence." He represented it to himself, not only as a struggle between different species of animals (wolves preying upon hares, many kinds of birds living on insects, and so forth), but also as an acute struggle within each species, among all the individuals of the species. In reality, however, such a struggle does not exist — certainly not to the extent imagined by Spencer — even among animals, and still less so among the most primitive savages. But once it was admitted by the philosopher, all his sociological conceptions suffered from that false supposition.
How far Darwin himself was responsible for this erroneous conception of the struggle for existence, we need not discuss here. But it is certain that when he published his " Descent of Man," twelve years after the " Origin of Species," he already took a far broader and a more metaphorical conception of the struggle for existence than that of a hard struggle between all the individuals within each species, which he had taken in his first great work in order to prove the importance of natural selection for the origin of new species. In his second great work, "The Descent of Man,' he wrote, on the contrary, that those species which contain the greatest number of mutually sympathetic individuals have the greatest chance of surviving and of leaving a numerous progeny, and thus he entirely upset his first conception of the struggle for life. And nevertheless, Spencer maintained it in full.
The chapters which Darwin gave in "The Descent of Man" to the development of human ethics out of the sociable habits of the animal ancestors of man, might have been the starting-point for working out a conception, exceedingly rich in consequences, of the nature and evolution of human societies (Goethe had already divined it); but these chapters of Darwin passed unnoticed. It was only in 1879, in a lecture given by the zoologist Kessler, that we find a clear conception of the relations existing in Nature between the struggle for existence and mutual a^d. "For the progressive evolution of a species," the Russian professor O 32 Modern Science aiid Anarchiam.
said, giving a few examples, "the law of mutual aid has far more importance than the law of mutual struggle."
A year Later, Lanessan delivered at Paris a lecture, "The Struggle for Existence and Association for Struggw"; and soon after that Biichner published his work, "Love," in which he showed the importance of sympathy among animals as a step towards developing the first conceptions of morality; but he gave to filial love and compassion too prominent a position, and thereby uselessly limited his field of research.
It was easy for me to give (in "Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution") further proof of Kessler's remarkable idea, and to eztend it to man. I had only to base my conclusions as regards mutual aid among animals on the accurate observations of Nature by the best field zoologists, and my views on the history of human institutions — on a mass of modern historical research. Among animals, mutual aid is, in fact, not only the most efficacious weapon in the struggle for existence against the hostile forces of Nature and against other inimical species, but it is also the principal instrument of progressive evolution. Even to the other- wise weakest animals it guarantees longevity (and consequently accumulation of experience), security for breeding their offspring, and intellectual progress. This is why those animal species which most practise mutual aid not only better survive in the struggle for life than those which lead an isolated life, but they also occupy a higher position in their own respective classes (of Insects, Birds, or Mammals) by the superiority of their physical structure and their intelligence.
This fundamental fact of Nature was not noticed by Spencer until 1890. He accepted, on the contrary, an acute struggle for life within each species as an established fact which needed no proof — as an axiom. A struggle to the death " with beak and claw " for each bit of food. " Nature stained with the gladiator's blood," such as Tennyson represented it, was his conception of animal life. It was only in 1890 that he began to understand, up to a certain point, the importance of mutual aid, or rather the sentiment of mutual sympathy in the animal world, and began to collect facts and make observations in this direction. But even then, primitive man always remained for him the ferocious beast of his own imagination, which exists only on the condition of seizing the last bit of food from the mouth of its neighbours.
It is evident that once he had adopted a premise as fallacious as this, Spencer could not construct his synthetic philosophy without falling into a series ol errors.
VII.
THE FUNCTION OF LAW IN SOCIETY.
Spencer is not the only one who fell into these errors. Remaining true to the teaching of Hobbes, the philosophers of the nineteenth century persisted in looking at primitive men as wild beasts living in small isolated families and fighting one another for their food and their womenfolk, till a kindly authority settled in their midst in order to enforce peace. Even a naturalist like Huxley went on repeating the same assertion as Hobbes, and wrote (in 1885) that in the beginning men lived by fighting "one against all," until, thanks to a few superior beings, "the first society was founded." (See his article, "The Struggle for Exist- ence: a Programme.") Thus, even a learned Darwinian like Huxley had no idea that society, far from having been created by man, existed among animals long before his appearance on the earth. Such is the force of an established prejudice.
If we endeavour to trace the history of this prejudice, we soon find that it derived its origin from religion and churches. The secret societies of wizards, rain-makers (shamans — half sorcerers and half priests), later on, the Assyrian and Egyptian priests, and stUl later on, the Christian priests, always endeavoured to persuade man that "the world is steeped in sin"; that only the kindly intervention of the shaman, the wizard, the saint, and the priest hinders the powers of evil from taking possession of man; that they alone can induce an angry divinity not to crush man by sin and then punish him for his ill deeds.
Primitive Christianity vainly endeavoured to weaken this prejudice as regards priests; but the Christian Church, taking a stand on the words of the Gospels concerning " eternal fire," only strengthened it. The idea itself of God the Son coming to die on earth, in order to redeem the sins of humanity, confirmed that way of thinking. And this is just what permitted the "Holy Inquisition" to subject their victims to the most atrocious tortures and to grill them on a slow fire: thus they were ofiered a chance of repentance and salvation from eternal suffering. Moreover, it was not only the Roman Catholic Church which 34 Moderti Science and Anarchism, acted in this way: all Christian Churches, faithful to the same principle, vied with one another in the invention of new bufferings in order to correct those stuck fast in "vice." Even now, nine people out of ten believe still that natural occurrences, such as droughts, earthquakes, and contagious diseases, are sent from on high by some kind of divinity to bring back sinning humanity to the right path.
At the same time, the State in its schools and universities maintained, and continues to maintain, the same faith in the natural perversity of man. Its teachers and professors every- where teach the necessity of having a power above man, and of implanting a moral element in society by means of punish- ments, inflicted for violation of "moral law," which by some cunning they identify with written law. To convince men that this authority is necessary is a question of life and death for the State; because, if men began to doubt the necessity of strengthening moral principles by the strong hand of authority, they would soon lose their faith in the high mission of their rulers.
In this manner all our religious, historical, juridical, and social education is imbued with the idea that human beings, if left to themselves, would revert to savagery; that without authority men would eat one another; for nothing, they say, can be expected of the " multitude " but brutishness and the warring of each against all. Men would perish if above them soared not the elect: the priest and the judge, with their two helpmates — the policeman and the hangman. These saviours prevent, we are told, the battle of all against all; they inculcate respect of law, they teach discipline, and lead men with a high hand, till nobler conceptions shall have developed in their " hardened hearts," so that the whip, the prison, and the scaffold may be less necessary than they are to-day.
We laugh at one of those kings who, having been driven away in 1848, said on leaving: "My poor subjects! without me they will perish! " We mock at the English tradesman who is persuaded that his compatriots descend from the lost tribe of Israel, and therefore it is their destiny to impose good government on " inferior races."
But do we not find in all nations this same exaggerated self- appreciation amongst most of those who have learned something ] And yet a scientific study of the development of societies and institutions brings us to quite different views. It proves that Modem Science and Anarchism. 35 usages and customs created by mankind for the sake of mutual aid, mutual defence, and peace in general, were precisely elabo- rated by the " nameless multitude." And it was these customs that enabled man to survive in his struggle for existence in the midst of extremely hard natural conditions. Science demonstrates to us that the so-called leaders, heroes, and legislators of humanity have added nothing to history beyond what had already been worked out by the Customary Law. The best of them have only put into words and sanctioned the institutions that already existed by habit and custom; while the great number of these would-be benefactors only strove to destroy the unwritten customary law whenever it hindered the establishment of their personal authority, or else they remodelled the popular institutions to their own advantage and to that of their caste.
As long ago as those remote ages which are lost in the dark night of the Glacial period, men lived in societies. And in these societies a whole series of institutions were worked out and rigidly observed, in order to make possible the life in common. And later on, through the whole course of human evolution, the same creative power of the nameless multitude always worked out new forms of social life, of mutual aid, of guarantees of peace, as soon as new conditions arose.
On the other hand, modern science clearly demonstrates that law, whatever its origin — whether represented as derived from a divinity or from the wisdom of a lawgiver — has never done more than to widen the sphere of application, to fix, or rather to crystallise in a permanent form, such customs as already were in existence. All the codes of antiquity were nothing else but collections of customs and habits, put in writing in order to preserve them for the coming generations. But in doing so, the lawmakers always added to these customs some new rules — rules of inequality and servile submission of the masses, in the interest of the armed rich and the warlike minorities.
•' Thou shalt not kill," the law of Moses said; " thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness." But to these excellent moral rules, generally recognised at that time, it added: " Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his slave, nor his ass," by which for a long time it legalised slavery, and put woman on a level with slaves and beasts of burden.
"Love your neighbour," said Christianity later on; but it hastened to add by the mouth of the Apostle Paul: " Slaves obey your masters," and "No authority but from God's will" — thus legitimising and deifying the division between masters and slaves.
86 Modern Science and Anarchism.
and perpetuating the authority of the scoundrels who ruled in Rome at that time.
Even the Gospels, while teaching the sublime idea of no revenge for offences, which is the essence of Christianity, speak all the while of a God of Vengeance, and by this means teach vengeance.
At a still later epoch, we find the same again in the codes of the so-called barbarians: the Gauls, the Ix)ngobards, the Alemanni, the Saxons, the Slavonians, after the fall of the Roman Empire. These codes legalised a custom, excellent no doubt, which began to spread at that time: that of paying compensation for wounds and murders, instead of practising the previously very general law of retaliation, which said: " Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blow for blow, and life for life." By so doing, the barbarian codes certainly represented an improvement on the law of blood- revenge, which had been the code of tribe life; but at the same time they also established the division of free men into classes — a distinction which was hardly perceptible yet at the time when law came in to enforce it, but was reinforced by it.
So much compensation — it was said now in the Barbarian codes — has to be paid for a slave (to the master of the slave); so much, much more, for a freeman; and so much, very much more, for a chieftain. In this last case the compensation was so high that it meant lifelong slavery for the mui'derer. Now, the primary idea of these distinctions, established by custom, was no doubt that the family of a chieftain, killed in a brawl, lost by his death far more than the family of an ordinary freeman who would have been killed in the same circumstance; consequently, the first had a right to a higher compensation than the second. But in legalising this custom, the code established a division of men into classes, and so firmly established it that up till now we have not been able to get rid of it.
And the same obtains in all legislation, even in that of our own times — the injustice and oppression that were practised at a particular period being handed down by law to the later periods. The tyranny of the Persian Empire was thus transmitted to Greece, that of Macedonia to Rome; and the oppression and cruelty of the Roman Empire and the Eastern autocracies and theocracies were transmitted to the young barbaric States when they began to be formed, and even to the Christian Church. By means of Law the past fettered the future.
All the guarantees that are necessary to the life of society, all Modem Science and Anarchism. 37 the forms of social life elaborated within the clans and tribes, the village communities, and later on in the mediaeval cities; all forms of relations between different tribes and clans, and between the city-republics of the mediaeval age, which became later on the first elements of International Law; all forms of mutual support iind of the defence of peace, including tribunals and juries, were elaborated by the creative genius of the nameless multitude; while all laws, from the most ancient ones till those of our own times, have always been composed of two very different elements. One of them strengthened (and fixed) certain habits and customs, already recognised as useful; while the other element of all laws was an addition to these customs — very often a mere malicious wording of an existing custom — the aim of which was to implant or strengthen the nascent authority of the kinglet, the nobleman, the soldier and the priest, to consolidate and sanction their power and their authority.
These are the conclusions to which we are led by the scientific study of the development of societies, a study that has been carried on during the last twenty or thirty years by a great number of conscientious scientists. It is true that men of science do not themselves dare to draw conclusions as heretical as those mentioned above; but the thoughtful reader of necessity comes to these conclusions after reading their works.
VIII. PLACE OF ANARCHISM IN MODERN SCIENCE.
What place, then, does Anarchism occupy in the great intellectual movement of the nineteenth century 1 The answer to this question is already apparent in what has been said in the preceding chapters. Anarchism is a conception of the Universe based on the mechanical* interpretation of phenomena, which comprises the whole of Nature, including the life of human societies and their economic, political, and moral problems. Its method is that of natural sciences, and every conclusion it comes to must be verified by this method if it pretends to be scientific. Its tendency is to work out a synthetic philosophy which will take in all facts of Nature, including the life of societies, without, however, falling into the errors of Comte and Spencer, which were due to reasons already pointed out.
It is evident that on this account Anarchism necessarily has to give its own answers to all questions put before us by modern life, and it unavoidably takes up an attitude with regard to them quite different from that of all political parties, as also, up to a certain point, of the Socialist parties, which have not yet freed themselves from old metaphysical fictions.
Of course, the elaboration of a complete mechanical conception of Nature and human societies is at present hardly begun in its sociological part, devoted to the life and evolution of societies. Nevertheless, the little that has been done, at times even uncon- sciously, already bears the character which we have indicated. In the philosophy of Law, in the theory of morals, in political economy, and in the historical study of nations and institutions. Anarchism has already proved that it would not content itself with tlie metaphysical conclusions of old, but would look for a naturalistic basis.
It refuses to be imposed upon by the metaphysics of Hegel, Schelling, and Kant, by the expositors of Roman or Canonical • It would have been better to wy "kinetic," but thia expression is less known, Modem Science and Anarchism 39 law, by learned professors of State law, or by the political economy of metaphysicians; and it endeavours to clearly under- stand all questions arising in these spheres, basing itself on a mass of work done from the naturalist's point of view during the last thirty or forty years.
In the same way as the metaphysical conceptions of a Mind of the Universe, a Creative Force of Nature, a Loving Attraction of Matter, an Incarnation of the Idea, an Aim of Xature, a Reason for its Existence, the Unknowable, and so forth were gradually abandoned by the materialist (mechanical, or rather kinetic) philosophy, and the embryos of generalisations found hidden behind these words were translated in the concrete language of facts, so do we endeavour now to proceed when we approach the facts of life in societies.
Wlien metaphysicians wish to persuade a naturalist that the intellectual and emotional life of man is unrolled "according to the inherent laws of the Spirit," the naturalist shrugs his shoulders and continues his patient study of the phenomena of life, of intelligence, and of emotions and passions, in order to prove that they may all be reduced to physical and chemical phenomena. He endeavours to discover their natural laws.
Likewise when an Anarchist is told that, according to Hegel, "every evolution represents a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis"; or that "the aim of Law is to establish Justice, which represents a materialisation of the Supreme Idea "; or yet again, when he is asked: " What is, then, according to you, the Aim of Life? " the Anarchist likewise shrugs his shoulders. And he asks himself: " How is it possible that with the present development of natural science there should still exist such antiquated beings who go on believing in these * words and words '? Men speaking still the language of the primitive savage, who used to anthropomorphise Nature by representing it as something governed by beings having human forms! "