Man theory, no one man really killed that theory. The general spread and acceptance of Darwinism has produced an intellectual atmosphere in which such a theory can no more live than a fish can live out of water.
By Darwinism we mean, as you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection—selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, was transported to the field of sociology by Spencer and applied with great power to all human institutions, legal, moral, economic, religious, etc. Spencer has taught the world that all social institutions are fluid and not fixed. As Karl Marx said in the preface to the first edition of Capital: "The present society is no solid crystal, but an organization capable of change, and is constantly changing," and again in the preface to the second edition, "Every historically developed social form is in fluid movement." This is the theory of Evolution in its broadest sense, and it has struck a death-blow to the conception of Permanence so dear to the hearts of the bourgeoisie who love to
