Part 3

These are examples: Because there are three persons in the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three orders in the church, bishops priests and deacons; three degrees of attainment, light, purity and knowledge; three virtues, faith, hope and charity, and three eyes in a honeybee; therefore, there can only be three colors, red, yellow and blue. Because there were seven churches in the apocalypse, seven golden candlesticks, seven cardinal virtues, seven deadly sins and seven sacraments; therefore, there could only be seven planets and seven metals. Because there were seventy-two disciples and seventy-two interpreters of the old testament and seventy-two mystical names of God; therefore there must be no more and no less than seventy-two joints in the human body.

During this period, European cities had no paving or lighting, and one could not step from a doorway in London or Paris without plunging ankle deep in mud. They had practically no drainage and they were, at frequent intervals devastated by the plague. But the cities of Andalusia, built and governed by the Moors in Spain, were drained, well lighted and solidly paved. They had public libraries and public schools. From their medical colleges Europe obtained the only doctors it had.

In the cities of Christian Europe these enlightened people were treated like dogs, while in their wonderful cities, visiting Christians were met with a hospitality and broad toleration wholly exceptional in the middle ages.

In Europe, even toward the close of this period, broad, scientific thinking was impossible. Nicholas Copernicus, in the 16th century, afraid of the faggot, carried as a secret locked in his own bosom, that heliocentric theory which is the foundation of modern astronomy. His great disciple Giordano Bruno, for expounding that theory with rare ability, after it was revealed by the great Prussian, was hunted through Europe like a wild animal and finally burned at the stake.

For the same reason, the third person in the trinity of the 16th century’s greatest thinkers, Galileo, was harassed and humiliated, and at last died a prisoner in his own house.

But all through this period, despite its intellectual stagnation, economic evolution proceeded, laying the foundation for a new intellectual superstructure. That evolution manifested itself chiefly in the rise and growth of a trading class. To the existence of such a class in its society, the Arabians owed their greater liberality, and scientific spirit. When Vasca Da Gama sailed down the west coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, trusting to chance for the outcome of his voyage, he found the Arabians directing their vessels by a strange instrument which we now call the mariner’s compass.

The merchants of Genoa and of Spain discovered that orthodox superstitions did not help but did seriously injure, their commerce. As captains for their ships they preferred for purely economic reasons, men who had become infected with the ideas of navigation of the pagan Arabians, to men who took their ideas of the universe from the city bishop or the village priest and kept their ships close to land, afraid lest they should sail off the edge of the world, or into that great hole where the angels put the sun at night, after they had finished rolling it across the sky.

It was the growth and final triumph of this trading class, with economic interests and a mode of wealth production that demanded the liberation of science, that abolished the thumbscrew and the stake. Voltaire, Rousseau, and the encyclopaedists were obnoxious to the feudal regime, lay and clerical, because they were the prophets and mouthpieces of the rising bourgeoisie.

This class, by the emancipation of science, performed a lasting service to the human race. The society in which it predominated, at once produced a prolific crop of great thinkers. Sweden had Linnaeus, England had Lyell, Germany had Goethe; but the palm fell to France. In the revolution France had suppressed the Sorbonne, that theological institution which had always shown itself the official and bitter enemy of science, and she soon after equipped scientific expeditions, which gave her the greatest thinkers of that day--Cuvier, St. Hilaire, and, most illustrious of all that courageous pioneer of modern evolution, Jean Lamarck.

The position of the capitalist class of a hundred years ago was very different from that of today. Then it was the harbinger of progress; now it is the stronghold of reaction. Its interests then were very different from its interests now. Then it was called upon by destiny to steer society into new waters; now destiny bids it, since its task is done, to step aside that a new hand may grip the wheel. Then it fought a social order which had had its day, now it is in the midst of social forces which it cannot administer. That was its lusty youth; this is its doddering old age.

When the Bourgeoisie released science from feudal chains, it let loose a force that carried it to victory, but, at that moment, it planted the germs of its own future destruction. Today it reverses its attitude and would fain suppress science or at least prevent its reaching the proletarian brain. But alas, it is in the grip of evolutionary processes of which it is merely a part, and it is bound, more securely than Prometheus to the rock, to a mode of production which makes the education of the proletariat a relentless necessity. The nation which keeps its working class in semi-feudal darkness is ground to pieces by the industrial competition of its neighbors--it goes to the wall in the struggle for existence. Thus, in the language of Marx, it is obliged by present necessity to dig its own future grave.

The same inscrutable power that called it forth to lead society to a new triumph, now relegates it to the rear and enthrones in its place a new class, a propertyless working class, the child of the wage system, destined to emancipate itself and, by the same stroke, the whole human race. If this be not the mission of the working class, as an instrument of social evolution, the press and platform of the Socialist movement is a useless dissipation of energy. But this is precisely what Marx proved when he laid the foundation of the Socialist philosophy.

Every year brings its quota of evidence that the working class is gathering the political capacity and the social intelligence necessary to equip it for this tremendous task.

Norway grew weary of Swedish dominance and decided to achieve national independence. At once the Swedish Bourgeoisie began to gird up its loins for a bloody dynastic war. The pampered sons of its aristocracy, unable to do anything useful, were to have glory thrust upon them, commanding, from the rear, regiments of Swedish workers to slaughter and be slaughtered by their exploited Norwegian brothers. But while these sinister preparations were in full blast, a vast army of Norwegians crossed the boundary line into Sweden and met a Swedish army of the same proportions. There was no blood-shedding for both armies were unarmed. In place of bayonets and needle guns they had their wives and children. They fraternized; they clasped hands; they tossed each other’s babies in their arms. From that moment war was impossible. They carried neither the national banner of Sweden nor of Norway. Over both those great armies, now become one, singing their songs of working class solidarity, there floated the red flag of the social revolution.

II.

LINNAEUS TO LAMARCK.

For a hundred years the word “progress” has been a word to conjure with. No proposal is too reactionary to be put forward in its name and the self-admitted conservative explains that he only wishes to “conserve” the good things which progress has bestowed upon us. It has been invoked on all sides of all questions, and no superstition was so ancient or absurd, no theory so exploded, but it could be revived under a new name and presented to the world as an infallible sign of the progress of the age.

But during the last century men have arisen, who were dissatisfied with a term that covered everything and meant nothing, and who were determined to find out what constituted progress and whether it had any existence in the world of reality. More has been accomplished in this respect during that century than in all the combined previous existence of the human race. The conception or idea of progress is the mental reflection of the process of evolution, which operates everywhere to the remotest niche or cranny in the material universe. The only difference between progress and evolution is that evolution is a more inclusive term, including as it does phenomena which we should call retrogressive.

The men who laid the foundations of modern knowledge, and imparted sense and force to hitherto meaningless terms, were they who threw aside theological phantasms and metaphysical speculations and set themselves the task of gathering the facts and ascertaining the laws of the real--the material--world. This is the method of science, and it is to this method that we owe all our knowledge of world problems.

For more than a thousand years this method was practically suspended. Any attempt, during that period, to make use of it was rigorously suppressed, except among the pagan Arabians. Biological science stood still, scarcely even marking time. Says Packard “After Aristotle, no epoch-making zoologist arose until Linnaeus was born,” a yawning chasm of thirteen hundred years.

Linnaeus, born 1707, in Sweden, was the greatest naturalist of his time and might have done greater things for evolutionary ideas had it not been for the theological influences which restrained him. But, hindered as he was, he accomplished enough to entitle him to a place among the immortals. “He found botany a chaos,” says Prof. Thatcher, “and left it a unity.” His contribution to science consists mainly in his system of classification and nomenclature. Before Linnaeus nobody had been able, though many had tried, to group and name animal and vegetable forms in such a manner as to rescue them from utter confusion. This is precisely what Linnaeus did when, by a happy idea, he adopted what is called the “binary nomenclature.”

This great advance was by no means far-fetched; it is simply an application of the double naming everywhere in use, as in the case of Tom Smith, Fred Smith, James Smith, in which Smith is used to denote the general or family name and Fred or Tom the particular or personal. In the application of this system to species, Linnaeus reversed the order as we do when we enter the names of persons on an alphabetical list, as Smith, Fred and Smith, James. As illustrations we will take the two cases, one from the animal and one from the plant world, selected by Haeckel for the same purpose. The generic name for cat is Felis. The common cat is Felis domestica; the wildcat, Felis catus; the panther, Felis pardus; the jaguar, Felis onca; the tiger, Felis tigris; the lion, Felis leo. All these second names are the names of the six species of the one genus--Felis. As an example in botany take the genus pine. According to Linnaeus the pine is Pinus abies; the fir, Pinus picea; the larch, Pinus larix; the Italian pine, Pinus pinea; the Siberian stone pine Pinus cembra; the knee timber, Pinus mughus; the common pine, Pinus silvestris. The seven second names apply to the seven species of the genus Pinus.

But this is not all. Besides grouping the species into genera, Linnaeus classified certain genera as belonging to the same “order.” Again he arranged these “orders” in “classes,” all these classes belonged to one of the two great “kingdoms,” vegetable and animal.

Not only was all this of great practical value but its theoretical influence has been incalculable. Linnaeus never saw, and probably would not have dared to proclaim if he had, that the resemblances which made his grouping possible, indicated a relationship based on descent from common ancestors. This was left for men of greater penetration and courage living in a less theological age. Prelates who smiled on the obscene debaucheries of Louis the XV. had Linnaeus’ writings prohibited from papal states, because they proved the existence of sex in plants.

Linnaeus not only proved sex in plants but made it the foundation of his classification. He also reminds us that plants were known to be of both sexes by oriental people in early days. Living as they did on the fruit of the date-palms they found it necessary to plant male trees among the females. Their enemies in war time struck a terrible blow when they cut down the male trees, thereby reducing them to famine. Sometimes the inhabitants themselves destroyed the male trees during impending invasion, so that the enemy should find no sustenance in their country; a war measure similar to that of Russians who burned Moscow in the face of Napoleon.

In the same year that Sweden produced Linnaeus, France gave birth to Buffon. Rich and independent, he chose to devote a long life to the study of natural history. He had remarkable powers of research and displayed genius in presenting the results of his investigation. But alas! he had less courage than Linnaeus and he lived nearer that terrible enemy of eighteenth century science, the theological department of the University of Paris--the dreaded Sorbonne.

As long as he confined himself to the mere description of animals he was a pet of the church, which seems to have pleased him, but when he began to draw evolutionary conclusions of real philosophical import and value, the Sorbonne at once opened its batteries. On these occasions Buffon’s retreat was prompt and unprotesting. It might be remembered as some mitigation of his cowardice that while the reign of the stake and faggot did not extend into the 18th century and there was no danger of the fate of the fearless Bruno, yet so strong was religious bigotry even in this period that Rousseau was hunted out of France, his books burned by the public executioner, and Diderot went to jail. “Hardly a single man of letters of that time escaped arbitrary imprisonment,” says John Morley in his “Rousseau.”

This was all very repugnant to the pride and vanity of Buffon and led him to adopt a style of writing much in vogue a century earlier when the theological hand was heavy as death. This method was to put forward the new idea as a heresy or a mere fancy, explain it, and then proceed with great show of earnestness to demolish it in favor of the orthodox view. This method succeeded admirably until it broke through the thick skulls of religious bigots that the case presented for the “heresy” was more convincing than the pretended reply.