Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/95

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INTELLECT UNDER CAPITALISM
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the subject. Public health, family needs, school hygiene, the whole field of Eugenics in its widest and most proper scope, is as sparsely tenanted by scientific investigators as central Australia is by agriculturists. But an emigration of interest has commenced and the evidence is so clear that one is tempted to prophesy that the science which is to add laurels to the twentieth century, as biology gave laurels to the nineteenth, is the science of sociology, including social heredity, social health, and social organisation; and in that science Socialist theory and programmes must find a central place. Socialism has made sociology important.

Thus our Socialism has its roots dug deep in literature, art, science, religion—in all the creative activities of the intellect. Sometimes these express themselves only as a revolt, sometimes as yearnings after the phantastical, sometimes they wander back to the religious brotherhoods that once were but which went out with the conditions which made them possible, sometimes they content themselves with singing of the ideal. But when the passions and longing they awaken, the principles and motives they proclaim, the rules and methods they demand, are all gathered together and systematised as a guide for practical politics and an impulse for immediate activity, it is Socialism which they create and encourage as their economic environment—Socialism, the revolt against individualist commercialism, the hypothesis from which the future organisation of society is to be built