efficiency with which he has been concerned elsewhere. He does not readily comprehend how the institutions which he sees being evolved in history have, in their effects on the individual, laws quite different from those which he applies in the breeding of animals; or how the dualism which has been opened in the human mind, as natural selection acts first of all on the individual in his own struggle with his fellows, and then, and to a ruling degree, acts on his as a member of organic society in the evolution of social efficiency, has in the religious and ethical systems of the race a phenomenology of its own, stupendous in extent and absolutely characteristic of the social process, which remains a closed book to him and the study of which he is often apt to consider for his purposes as entirely meaningless. All this became rapidly visible in the first approach of the early Darwinians to the science of society.
Darwin, as stated, had attempted no comprehensive or systematic study of society. But in a few chapters of the Descent Darwin. of Man he had discussed the qualities of the human mind, including the social and moral feelings, from the point of view of the doctrine of natural selection enunciated in the Origin of Species. The standpoint he took up was, as might be expected, practically that of Mill and Spencer and other writers of the period on social subjects, from whom he quoted freely. But the note of bewilderment was remarkable. The conclusion remarked upon as implied in Spencer's theory of the social organism, but which Spencer himself hesitated to draw, namely, that natural selection was to be regarded as suspended in human society, Darwin practically formulated. Thus at times Darwin appeared to think that natural selection could effect but comparatively little in advanced society. “With highly civilized nations,” he says, “continued progress depends to a subordinate degree on natural selection.” While Darwin noted the obvious usefulness of the social and moral qualities in many cases, he felt constrained at the same time to remark upon their influence in arresting, as appeared to him, the action of natural selection in civilization. “We civilized men,” he continues, “do our utmost to check the process of elimination (of the weak in body and mind); we build asylums for the imbeciles, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.” There is here in evidence no attempt to connect the phenomena thus brought into view with some wider principle of the evolutionary process which evidently must control them. There is no perception visible in Darwin's mind of these facts as constituting the phenomenology of a larger principle of natural selection; or of the higher organic efficiency in the struggle for existence of societies in which the sense of responsibility to life thus displayed has made most progress; or of the immense significance in social evolution as distinct from individual evolution of that deepening of the social consciousness of which this developing spiritual sense of responsibility to our fellow creatures is one of the outward marks characteristic of advanced societies.
In the year 1889 Alfred Russel Wallace in a statement of his conception of the doctrine of evolution in his book, Darwinism, Wallace. brought more clearly into view the fundamental difficulty of the early Darwinians in applying the doctrine of natural selection to society. In the last chapter of the book Mr Wallace maintained that there were in “man's intellectual and moral nature. . . certain definite portions. . . which could not have been developed by variation and natural selection alone.” Certain faculties, amongst which he classed the mathematical, artistic and metaphysical, the latter covering qualities with which he considered priests and philosophers to be concerned, were, he asserted, “altogether removed from utility in the struggle for life,” and were, therefore, he thought, “wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection.” In this elementary conception which still survives in popular literature, the same confusion between individual efficiency and social efficiency has to be remarked upon. And there is in evidence the same failure to perceive that it is just these intellectual and moral qualities which are the absolutely characteristic products of natural selection in advanced society, in that they contribute to the highest organic social efficiency. Wallace in the result proposed to consider man, in respect of these higher portions of his mind, as under the influence of some cause or causes wholly distinct from those which had shaped the development of life in its other characteristics. The weakness of this position was immediately apparent. To remove man as regards qualities so directly associated with his social evolution from the influence of the law of natural selection was felt to be a step backwards. The effect produced on the minds of the younger school of evolutionists was deep. It operated, indeed, not to convince them that Wallace was right, but to make them feel that his conception of natural selection operating in human society was still in some respect profoundly and radically incomplete.
A few years later, Huxley, though approaching the matter from a different direction, displayed a like bewilderment in Huxley. attempting to apply the doctrine of evolution to the phenomena of organic society. With his mind fixed on the details of the individual struggle for existence among animals, Huxley reached in the Romanes lecture, delivered at Oxford in 1893, a position little different from that in which Wallace found himself. In this lecture Huxley actually proceeded to place the ethical process in human society in opposition to the cosmic process, to which latter alone he considered the struggle for existence and the principle of natural selection belonged. “Social progress,” he went on to say, “means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.” Thus the remarkable spectacle already witnessed in Spencer, Darwin and Wallace of the evolutionist attempting to apply his doctrines to human society, but having to regard his own central principle of natural selection as having been suspended therein is repeated in Huxley. The futility of contemplating the ethical process as something distinct from the cosmic process was at once apparent. For the first lesson of evolution as applied to society must be that they are one and the same. So far indeed from ethical process checking the cosmic process, it must be regarded as the last and highest form of the cosmic process. The sense of subordination and sacrifice which forms the central principle of all the creeds of humanity, so far from being, as Wallace imagined, “altogether removed from utility” is, indeed, the highest form of social efficiency through which natural selection is producing its most far-reaching effects in the evolution of the most advanced and organic types of civilization.
A similar tendency continued to be in evidence in other directions. In an effort made a few years later to found a Galton. society for the study of sociology in Great Britain a very characteristic feature of the first papers contributed was the attempt to apply elementary biological generalizations regarding natural selection to a highly complex organism like human society, the writers having in most cases made no previous extensive or special study of the social process in history. The confusion between what constitutes individual efficiency in the individual and that higher social efficiency in the individual which everywhere controls and overrules individual efficiency was very marked. An early paper contributed in 1904 was by Mr (afterwards Sir) Francis Galton, one of the last and greatest of the early Darwinians. Galton had made many original contributions to the doctrine of evolution, and had been occupied previously with researches into individual efficiency as displayed among families, his Hereditary Genius being a notable book of this type. The object of his paper was to explain the scope and aim of a new science, “eugenics,” which he defined as the science which deals with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of the race and develop them to the utmost advantage. Galton found no difficulty whatever in setting up his sociological standards for the best specimens of the race. Even the animals in the Zoological Gardens, he
