OF SOCIETY. 461 



and science. It is well known that Darwin, with his 

 co-discoverer Wallace, as both have put on record, got 

 from the work of Malthus the idea of a general 

 struggle for existence, applied by Malthus himself only 

 in relation to social competition. I shall come back to 

 this point when dealing later on with the influence of 

 biological ideas upon sociology. 



The change which came over philosophical thought in 

 this country during the last quarter of the Eighteenth, 

 and gave it a specific character during the first half of 

 the Nineteenth Century, was, as I stated above, largely 

 owing to the influence of French pre - revolutionary 

 thinkers. For a long time this influence seemed, indeed, 

 confined to this country, for neither France itself nor 

 Germany made any original contribution to this side of 

 the subject. The French Revolution had produced a 

 general unsettlement which was little favourable to the 

 calm consideration of existing problems in France, but 

 which was, on the other side, in Germany stimulating 

 and productive of speculative theories for the most part 

 far removed from the arena of practical economics and 

 politics. Thus England had for nearly fifty years a 

 monopoly in the domain of genuine social philosophy. 



But the very different conditions which existed on the 

 Continent had, inter alia, the effect of developing the 

 other two principal departments of social philosophy 

 which I mentioned above ; that department, on the one 

 side, which deals with the fundamental questions of the 

 Constitution and Government of Society, and that, on the 

 other side, which deals with the History of Societies. 

 For the long period during which England's monopoly in 



