5. Economic Determinism.
There is another class of objections to which it will be most convenient to refer at this point. They arise from the mistakes of Socialists themselves, and are an inheritance from the first generation of "scientific Socialists." It was necessary that Marx and his contemporaries should attempt to devise some shibboleth which would sharply mark off Socialism from other theories of social reformation and from vague expressions of philanthropic goodness, and not a few of these attempts have suffered and have failed because, in addition to embodying what is essential to a Socialist creed, they have also reflected what were the personal views of the writers on unessential matters, or they have been coloured and moulded in the thought of the time when they were first stated. I shall deal with two of them.
Socialism to-day suffers because it has received an inheritance of scientific materialism from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the intellect of the West was occupied and entranced by the discoveries of biological science, by the rude shaking which biological evolution gave to spiritual expressions and phenomena, by the systematic orderliness in which economic explanations set many historical events, and by the enthusiasm for materialist solutions which was natural to the time. This gave rise to the shibboleth of the materialist conception of history, which a section of Socialist
