APPENDIX II

THE INFLUENCE OF CHARLES DARWIN ON HISTORICAL AND

POLITICAL SCIENCE

HE theories of Charles Darwin

THE

found readier and prompter acceptance among historians than among biologists.

When Darwin presented the doctrine of natural selection to the zoologists and botanists he was confronting them with a new set of scientific ideas and conceptions. His contemporaries were reluctant to accept these new ideas. They had been brought up to regard different species as having been created independently. The idea that types could be modified by slow process of change was something foreign to their minds.

The idea that existing

types simply represented the result of successful experiment in a field where the unsuccessful experiments had been eliminated by death was still more novel and repugnant. It was not until the generation after Darwin that his fellow biologists as a class were ready to abandon the idea of special acts of creation for specific purposes and to search instead for the slow operation of natural causes.

In history and in politics the case was different. All students of history accepted the idea of evolution in their own field of special study; most of them regarded historical evolution as the result of a process of natural selection.

Without an underlying idea of evolution human history is a meaningless chronicle, unworthy of the attention of intelligent men. If different historical events were independent of one another there would be no sense in writing history at all.

All serious investigators in this field, from Thucydides and Aristotle down to the present time, have sought either to develop the details of this orderly and gradual evolution or to lay down the principles of its operation. The man who today reads the Politics of Aristotle for the first time will be struck by the prevalence of methods of thought which many biologists suppose Darwin to have invented. And the same idea of evolution thus used by Aristotle has been applied in varying forms by all who sought to develop a philosophy of history-by Hegel and his followers in Germany or by men of the type of Henry Thomas Buckle in England.

Not only was the idea of evolution thus familiar to the historians; the idea of natural selection was also prominent in the minds of many of them. The whole doctrine of John Stuart Mill concerning liberty was founded upon reliance on a

process of natural selection. Look for your hero in all possible directions, he said, and you get the best chance of finding him. The issue between Mill and Carlyle reminds one of the controversies between Darwinian and anti-Darwinian in the field of biology. Carlyle believed in the special creation of a number of individual heroes; Mill, together with nearly all scientifically trained historians, believed in the evolution of heroes by natural selection.

The conception of economic or political conflict as a means of determining the survival of the fittest was seen perhaps even more conspicuously in Malthus's theory of population—a theory which Darwin himself regarded as having in some respects foreshadowed his own work. Malthus based his whole treatment of political economy upon the doctrine that population tended to outrun subsistence; that the struggle for existence was a constant pro

cess of elimination of the weak; and that any attempt to interfere with this process resulted rather in the deterioration than in the improvement of the peoples that it was designed to benefit.

If then the idea of evolution had been a fundamental one in historical and political science for more than two thousand years, and if the idea of elimination by natural selection was by no means unfamiliar to political thinkers, what was there left for the followers of Darwin to do in this field?

They found at least two things to do. In the first place, they showed how natural selection was a means of developing, not only individuals of superior ability or intelligence, but types of superior adaptation to their surroundings; and they taught us further to regard this adaptation of the type to its surroundings as the thing which gave it its right to exist.