“This perverse determination to place man and brutes in the same category, interests me not so much from the scriptural standpoint as for reasons moral and social. Science, as the more moderate of our adversaries have told us often enough, does not assail religion, but proceeds on its way regardless of the consequences. And the consequences we see only too plainly, now that the evolutionary philosophy has invaded every branch of knowledge and walk of life, and has seeped down among the ignorant and turbulent masses. These consequences are known as socialism and anarchy. The protagonists of the new philosophy strove to repudiate them at first: but now many of their number have laid aside even this pretense. Socialistic doctrines are based exclusively upon our assumed kinship with the brutes, and the leaders of militant socialism have inscribed on the frontispieces of their books the chain fatally logical and terribly true of three names, Darwin, Spencer, Marx. “In truth, our common origin with the brutes being taken for granted, why should we not enjoy in common with them the right to gratify every instinct? Social inequalities are the product of laws and conventionalities willed by the rich and powerful. In the natural and primitive state of things they did not exist; why not proceed then to a general leveling of the existing social order? “Such an origin of the human race being assumed, the existence of the soul and a future life becomes a myth invented by the priests of the various religions. With this inconvenient restraint removed, there remains no alternative save to aspire to the acquisition of all the pleasures of life; and for him who lacks the wherewithal to procure them for himself there remains no other recourse than to seek them by means of violence or strategy. Hence anarchy. In this supposition, morality no longer possesses that sole, true, and efficacious sanction which religion alone can furnish; it amounts to nothing more than the resultant of the evolution of the individual’s perfections and their coördination to the well-being of his race and of society. But if, by reason of retarded evolution, the social instincts have not progressed to the point of repressing the individual or egoistic instincts, what guilt will there be in the delinquent who lapses into the most atrocious crimes? Hence free will is another myth that positive psychology and the science of moral statistics have already been at pains to explode. “And behold the suffering, the unfortunate, and the dying deprived of their sole consolation, the last hope which faith held out to them, and society reduced to an inferno of desperadoes and suicides! I could go on showing in this way, to what a pass the evolutionistic theories bring society and the individual.” (“La teoria dell’ evoluzione e le sue applicazioni,” p. 46.) GLOSSARY