and with expressions which differ from his only to lose precision and
eloquence--by those opponents of socialism who love to appear
scientific, and who, for polemical convenience, make use of those
ready-made or stereotyped phrases which have currency, even in science,
more than is commonly imagined.

It is easy, nevertheless, to demonstrate that, in this debate, Virchow's
way of looking at the subject was the more correct and more
perspicacious, and that the history of these last twenty years has amply
justified his position.

It has happened, indeed, that Darwinism and socialism have both
progressed with a marvelous power of expansion. From that time the one
was to conquer--for its fundamental theory--the unanimous endorsement of
naturalists; the other was to continue to develop--in its general
aspirations as in its political discipline--flooding all the conduits of
the social consciousness, like a torrential inundation from internal
wounds caused by the daily growth of physical and moral disease, or like
a gradual, capillary, inevitable infiltration into minds freed from all
prejudices, and which are not satisfied by the merely personal
advantages that they derive from the orthodox distribution of spoils.

But, as political or scientific theories are natural phenomena and not
the capricious and ephemeral products of the free wills of those who
construct and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents
of modern thought have each been able to triumph over the opposition
they first aroused--the strongest kind of opposition, scientific and
political conservatism--and if every day increases the army of their
avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us--I was about to
say by a law of intellectual _symbiosis_--that they are neither