was so perfect and all-inclusive as to leave them no ideal at which to
aim.

The individual or the society which no longer has an ideal to strive
toward is dead or about to die.[9] The formula of communism may then be
a more remote ideal, when collectivism shall have been completely
realized by the historical processes which I will consider further on.

We are now in a position to conclude that there is no contradiction
between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of the equality of all
men. Socialism has never laid down this proposition and like Darwinism
its tendency is toward a better life for individuals and for society.

This enables us also to reply to this objection, too often repeated,
that socialism stifles and suppresses human individuality under the
leaden pall of collectivism, by subjecting individuals to uniform
monastic regulations and by making them into so many human bees in the
social honey-comb.

Exactly the opposite of this is true. Is it not obvious that it is under
the present bourgeois organization of society that so many
individualities atrophy and are lost to humanity, which under other
conditions might be developed to their own advantage and to the
advantage of society as a whole? To-day, in fact, apart from some rare
exceptions, every man is valued for what he _possesses_ and not for what
he _is_.[10]

He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his own, may be endowed by
Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his patrimony is
insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles for