Modern Science and Anarchism
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9780217317252
Paperback|9780217317252
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tutions. In this respect he is distinguished even among the English, who generally do not enter readily into foreign modes of life and thought. We are a people of Roman law, and the Irish are common-law people: therefore we do not understand each other, a very intelligent Englishman once remarked to me. The history of the Englishmen's relations with the lower races is full of like misunderstandings. And we see them in Spencer's writings at every step. He is quite incapable of understanding the customs and ways of thinking of the savage, the blood revenge of the Icelandic saga, or the stormy life, filled with struggles, of the mediaeval cities. The moral ideas of these stages of civilization are absolutely strange to him; and he sees in them only savagery, despotism, and cruelty. Finally?what is still more important?Spencer, like Huxley and many others, utterly misunderstood the meaning of the struggle for existence. He saw in it, not only a struggle between different species of animals (wolves devouring rabbits, birds feeding on insects, etc.), but also a desperate struggle for food, for living- room, among the different members within every species?a struggle which, in reality, does not assume anything like the proportions he imagined. How far Darwin himself was to blame for this misunderstanding of the real meaning of the struggle for existence, we cannot discuss here. But certain it is that when, twelve years after The Origin of Species, Darwin published his Descent of Man he already understood struggle for life in a different sense. Those communities, he wrote in the latter work, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the greatest number of offspring. The chapter devoted by Darwin to th...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217317252 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217317251 |
| Weight | 0.20 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.12 In |
| List Price | $14.14 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 50 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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