Influence of Malthus 15 



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 theo- 

 logical 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 1 ." 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 anticipations when he 

 published the first edition of The Origin of Species. Wells, whose 

 "Essay on Dew" is still remembered, read in 1813 before the Royal 

 Society a short paper entitled "An account of a White Female, part 

 of whose skin resembles that of a Negro" (published in 1818). In 

 this communication, as Darwin said, "he observes, firstly, that all 

 animals tend to vary in some degree, and, secondly, that agriculturists 

 improve their domesticated animals by selection ; and then, he adds, 

 but what is done in this latter case ' by art, seems to be done with 

 equal efficacy, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of 

 varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit 2 .' " 

 Thus Wells had the clear idea of survival dependent upon a favourable 

 variation, but he makes no more use of the idea and applies it only 

 to man. There is not in the paper the least hint that the author 

 ever thought of generalising the remarkable sentence quoted above. 

 Of Mr Patrick Matthew, who buried his treasure in an appendix 



1 P. Geddes, article "Biology," Chambers's Encyclopaedia. 



2 Origin of Species (6th edit.) p. xv. 



