466 Darwinism and Sociology 



this attitude. Take for instance the first part of The Descent of 

 Man : it is an accumulation of typical facts, all tending to diminish 

 the distance between us and our brothers, the lower animals. One 

 might say that the naturalist had here taken as his motto, "^Vho- 

 soever shall exalt himself shall be abased ; and he that shall humble 

 himself shall be exalted." Homologous structures, the survival in 

 man of certain organs of animals, the rudiments in the animal of 

 certain human faculties, a multitude of facts of this sort, led Darwin 

 to the conclusion that there is no ground for supposing that the 

 " king of the universe " is exempt fi*om universal laws. Thus belief 

 in the imjjeriwn in imperio has been, as it were, whittled away by 

 the progress of the naturalistic spirit, itself continually strengthened 

 by the conquests of the natural sciences. The tendency may, indeed, 

 drag the social sciences into overstrained analogies, such, for instance, 

 as the assimilation of societies to organisms. But it will, at least, 

 have had the merit of helping sociology to shake ofi" the pre-con- 

 ception that the groups formed by men are artificial, and that 

 history is completely at the mercy of chance. Some years before 

 the appearance of The Origin of Species, Auguste Comte had 

 pointed out the importance, as regards the unification of positive 

 knowledge, of the conviction that the social world, the last refuge 

 of spiritualism, is itself subject to determinism. It cannot be doubted 

 that the movement of thought which Darwin's discoveries promoted 

 contributed to the spread of this conviction, by breaking down the 

 traditional barrier which cut man ofi" from Nature. 



But Nature, according to modem naturalists, is no immutable 

 thing : it is rather perpetual movement, continual progression. 

 Their discoveries batter a breach directly into the Aristotelian notion 

 of species ; they refuse to see in the animal world a collection of 

 immutable types, distinct from all eternity, and corresponding, as 

 Cuvier said, to so many particular thoughts of the Creator. Darwin 

 especially congratulated himself upon having been able to deal this 

 doctrine the coup de grdce : immutability is, he says, his chief 

 enemy ; and he is concerned to show — therein following up Lyell's 

 work — that everything in the organic world, as in the inorganic, is 

 explained by insensible but incessant transformations. "Nature 

 makes no leaps" — "Nature knows no gaps": these two dicta 

 form, as it were, the two landmarks between which Darwin's idea 

 of transformation is worked out. That is to say, the development of 

 Darwinism is calculated to further the application of the philosophy 

 of Becoming to the study of human institutions. 



The progress of the natural sciences thus brings unexpected 

 reinforcements to the revolution which the progress of historical 

 discipline had begun. The first attempt to constitute an actual 



