460 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



dealing with the larger problems of social science. In 

 relation to these his celebrated contemporary, Thomas 

 Eobert Malthus (1766-1834), is of much more import- 

 ance, and this for several reasons. His well-known 

 treatise on ' Population ' directed the attention of social 

 philosophers to a subject which has since become of 

 increasing importance, and upon which most extreme and 

 opposite views have sprung up. 



At a time when economists all over Europe considered 

 that economic prosperity went hand in hand with dense 

 populations, when some of the leading countries of 

 Europe were very thinly populated, and when Adam 

 Smith's " Theory of Labour " — emphasised in a one-sided 

 way by Kicardo — encouraged a natural desire to see 

 populations grow, Malthus gave, for a time at least, an 

 opposite turn to speculation on this subject. He did 

 this by his well-known, though somewhat exaggerated, 

 formula, that population tends to increase in a geo- 

 metrical, while the means of subsistence increases only 

 in an arithmetical, ratio. Malthus does not seem to 

 have been stimulated by Adam Smith, but rather by 

 opposition to views expressed by William Godwin, a 

 direct disciple of Condorcet, on the one side, and by his 

 own father, Daniel Malthus, who had been a personal 

 friend of Eousseau's, on the other. 



We thus trace through him the direct influence in 

 this country of a special line of French thought of which 

 Adam Smith took little or no notice. On the other side, 

 Malthus points forward to a much more recent line of 

 thought, which has made itself as acutely felt in soci- 

 ology as it has done in other regions of philosophy 



