![]() ![]() I should, therefore, attack these bourgeois Darwinists something after this fashion (and shall perhaps do so in time):. What we need is hate rather than love – to begin with, at any rate – and, above all, to get rid of the last remnants of German idealism and instate material facts in their historic rights. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and is still doing such enormous harm, it would be unsuitable, and would be misunderstood and distorted sentimentally. For Russia, where you know your public better than I do, and for a propagandist journal appealing to the bond of sentiment, to moral feeling, your method is probably the better one. Each of us is more or less influenced by the intellectual medium in which he chiefly moves. (3) Without disputing the merits of your method of attack, which I might call a psychological one, I should myself have chosen a different method. Seidlitz is only a lesser light at best, and Robert Byr is a novelist, whose novel Three Times is appearing at the moment in By Land and Sea – just the right place for his whole rodomontade too. (2) Of the three convinced Darwinists cited, Hellwald alone seems to be worth mentioning. If, therefore, a so-called natural scientist permits himself to subsume the whole manifold wealth of historical development under the one-sided and meagre phrase, “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can only be taken with a grain of salt, such a proceeding is its own condemnation. The interaction of natural bodies – whether animate or inanimate – includes alike harmony and collision, struggle and co-operation. Both conceptions have a certain justification within certain limits, but each is as one-sided and narrow as the other. Before Darwin, the very people (Vogt, Buchner, Moleschott, etc.) who now see nothing but the struggle for existence everywhere were stressing precisely the co-operation in organic nature – how the vegetable kingdom supplies the animal kingdom with oxygen and foodstuffs while the animal kingdom in turn supplies the vegetable kingdom with carbonic acid and manures, as Liebig, in particular, had emphasised. (1) Of the Darwinian theory I accept the theory of evolution but only take Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) as the first, provisional, and incomplete expression of a newly-discovered fact. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise. Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Lavrov, here published for the first time in English, has been specially translated and annotated from a facsimile of the original, kindly supplied to the LABOUR MONTHLY by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. 437-442, “Engels and Darwin – Letter to Lavrov,” edited by Dona Torr Marx-Engels Correspondence 1875 Engels to Lavrov ![]()
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