nimate world is the result of an
age-long process of natural transformation, he wrote for _The
Westminster Review_ another important essay, "A Theory of Population
deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility," towards the close
of which he came within an ace of recognising that the struggle for
existence was a factor in organic evolution. At a time when pressure
of 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."[28] 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
principle of Natural Selection had been independently recognised by
Dr. W. C. Wells in 1813 and by Mr. Patrick Matthew in 1831, but he had
no knowledge of these anticipat