It shewed that the surprising changes which Robert Owen had
produced in factory children by a change in their circumstances which
does not seem any too generous to us nowadays were as nothing to the
changes--changes not only of habits but of species, not only of species
but of orders--which might conceivably be the work of environment acting
on individuals without any character or intellectual consciousness
whatever. No wonder the Socialists received Darwin with open arms.
DARWIN AND KARL MARX
Besides, the Socialists had an evolutionary prophet of their own, who
had discredited Manchester as Darwin discredited the Garden of Eden.
Karl Marx had proclaimed in his Communist Manifesto of 1848 (now
enjoying Scriptural authority in Russia) that civilization is an
organism evolving irresistibly by circumstantial selection; and he
published the first volume of his Das Kapital in 1867. The revolt
against anthropomorphic idolatry, which was, as we have seen, the secret
of Darwin's success, had been accompanied by a revolt against the
conventional respectability which covered not only the brigandage and
piracy of the feudal barons, but the hypocrisy, inhumanity, snobbery,
and greed of the bourgeoisie, who were utterly corrupted by an
essentially diabolical identification of success in life with big
profits.
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