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 induction was easily exaggerated, and they were represented as indisputable 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 conclusions. 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.
