in reality infinitely more complex (and far more interesting) than we should be led to believe if we judged by metaphysical formulas.
We have heard of late very much about the dialectic method, recommended to us by Social Democrats in order to elaborate the Socialist ideal. But we no more admit this method than would natural science. The dialectic method reminds the modern naturalist of something very antiquated that has had its day and is forgotten, happily long since forgotten by science. No discovery of the nineteenth century, in mechanics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, or anthropology, has been made by the dialectic method. All the immense acquisitions of the century are due to the use of the inductive-deductive method—the only scientific method. And as man is a part of Nature, as his personal and social life is a natural phenomenon, just as the growth of a flower, or the evolution of life in societies of ants or bees—there is no reason why we should, when we pass from the flower to man, or from a village of beavers to a human city, abandon the method which till then has been so useful, and look for another method in the realms of metaphysics.
The inductive-deductive method which we employ in natural sciences has so well proved its efficacy that the nineteenth century has been able to advance science in a hundred years more than it had progressed before during two thousand years. And when men of science began, in the second half of the century, to apply the same method to the study of human societies, never did they stumble upon an obstacle which rendered its rejection necessary, or made advisable a return to the mediaeval scholasticism resuscitated by Hegel. Besides, when some naturalists, doing honour to their bourgeois education, and pretending to be followers of the scientific method of Darwin, told us: "Crush whoever is weaker than yourself: such is the law of Nature!" it was easy for us to prove, first, that this was not Darwin's conclusion, and, using the same scientific method, to show that these scientists were on the wrong path: that such a law does not exist, that Nature teaches us a very different lesson, and that their conclusions were in nowise scientific.
The same is true as regards the assertion which economists tried to make us believe: namely, that the inequality of fortunes is "a law of Nature," and that capitalistic exploitation represents the most advantageous form of social organisation. By applying
