MODERN BIOLOGY 459 



legislation and democratic social development were demanded and even grad- 

 ually achieved without violent upheavals. This beliefwas strongly influenced 

 by Rousseau's doctrines of the natural goodness of man; which has only been 

 perverted by social life and by the oppression of evil kings and priests; it 

 found expression in the democratic reforms of the French Revolution, but 

 it acquired its true character through the great technical and material prog- 

 ress made during the nineteenth century, to which reference has already been 

 made above. The new big-scale industrial development and world trade, ren- 

 dered possible by steam-power, created an intelligent middle class, which 

 felt well satisfied with the present and hoped for still greater benefits from 

 the future; the labouring classes were not yet organized and their discontent 

 was thus perceptible only in isolated instances. The vast production of ma- 

 terial values set its mark upon the age and was met by the belief, adopted 

 from Rousseau, in the natural goodness of the human race and in Bentham's 

 doctrine of happiness for as many as possible as the chief aim in life; hap- 

 piness was made the synonym for material welfare, and this could best be 

 attained by letting mankind, endowed by nature with goodness and intel- 

 ligence, look after themselves, undisturbed by oppression and superfluous 

 regulations. Human life thus came to be regarded as a dominion of imper- 

 sonal forces guiding humanity with the necessity of a natural law towards 

 better times, if only they were allowed to operate freely. The people — the 

 impersonal summary of the individuals living in a country — were better 

 advised than any single person; if only they were allowed to look after 

 themselves, their activities would conduce to a successful development, to 

 which there seemed to be no limits. Free competition both in the material 

 and in the spiritual world and no interference with the individual's liberty 

 of action were the watchwords of the age; how the free will of the indi- 

 vidual was eventually to be reconciled with the popular will was a question 

 that did not bother the minds of many; for the time being, the individuals 

 looked up to the popular will as to a higher power, the only fault of which 

 was that it had not yet had sufficient time in which to operate. 



This conception of life, which naturally appeared under quite different 

 forms in different quarters — in historians like Buckle, in thinkers like Mill 

 and Spencer, not to speak of their pupils and imitators on the Continent — 

 was without doubt the most favourable soil possible in which to cultivate 

 a general theory of evolution. Evolution, Progress, were in fact the slogan 

 of the age. It had been employed in Comte's system, described above, but 

 only as far as regards human culture; through Darwin evolution was ele- 

 vated to a natural law governing all life. It is no wonder, then, that his 

 theory was hailed with enthusiasm by all those who cherished the ideals 

 of the new age. It was indeed the ideal itself that was hereby sanctioned to 

 embrace the whole of nature; on the other hand, it affords an explanation 



