population was practically interesting men's minds, Darwin, Wallace, and
Spencer were being independently led from a social problem to a biological
theory. There could be no better illustration, as Prof. Patrick Geddes has
pointed out, of the Comtian thesis that science is a "social phenomenon."

Therefore, as far more important than any further ferreting out of vague
hints of Natural Selection in books which Darwin never read, we would
indicate by a quotation the view that the central idea in Darwinism is
correlated with contemporary social evolution. "The substitution of Darwin
for Paley as the chief interpreter of the order of nature is currently
regarded as the displacement of an anthropomorphic view by a purely
scientific one: a little reflection, however, will show that what has
actually happened has been merely the replacement of the anthropomorphism
of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated
by Paley's theological and metaphysical explanation has simply been
occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the
prevalent severity of industrial competition, and those phenomena of the
struggle for existence which the light of contemporary economic theory has
enabled us to discern, have thus come to be temporarily exalted into a
complete explanation of organic progress." (P. Geddes, article "Biology",
"Chambers's Encyclopaedia".) It goes without saying that the idea
suggested by Malthus was developed by Darwin into a biological theory which
was then painstakingly verified by being used as an interpretative formula,
and that the validity of a theory so established is not affected by what
suggested it, but the practical question which this line of thought raises
in the mind is this: if Biology did thus borrow with such splendid results
from social theory, why should we not more deliberately repeat the
experiment?

Darwin was characteristically frank and generous in admitting that the