156 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. 



perpetually battling with one another for their share of the soil, 

 the rainfall, and the sunshine. . . . And the struggle is chiefly 

 between members of the same species. ... It is not the 

 soldier, or the sailor, or the ploughman that kills the artisan, 

 but the number of artisans who undersell him and crowd him 

 to fill up every vacant position." Malthus's work, which 

 aroused debate everywhere, exercised enormous influence as 

 a " germinal factor " upon the whole subsequent course of 

 sociological and economical thought. Its influence on the 

 current of biological and speculative opinion was just as far- 

 reaching; for Charles Darwin candidly states that he hit upon 

 the idea which made him famous upon reading Malthus. 

 " With my mind prepared (as you know)," says he, " I 

 fortunately happened to read Malthus's Essay on Population, 

 and the idea of natural selection through the struggle for 

 existence at once occurred to me." Hence it has aptly been 

 observed that Darwinism is Malthusianism on a large scale ; 

 it is " the application of the calculus of population to the 

 wide facts of universal life."* Given Malthus on the one 

 hand, and Lamarckian evolution on the other, a Darwin 

 must have combined the two and have arrived at the theory 

 of natural selection. Malthus, therefore, by his original 

 Essay, assisted three scientific branches sociology, anthro- 

 pology, and biology in an equal degree. His influence over 

 sociology bore naturally on political economy rather than 

 social questions. 



1769 1859. Humboldt, who was a stranger to no 

 science, deserves a place among scciologists, for the light he 

 throws, in his " Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain," on 

 commerce, industry, agriculture, mineral wealth, etc., thereby 

 assisting political economists. 



1798 1857. Comte founded sociology scientifically in 

 his " POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY " by analysing the growth of 

 society, the course of its evolution through its theological, 

 metaphysical, and positive stages ; by showing its defects 

 and the remedies likely to remove them. The cause of our 

 political and moral anarchy, according to him, lies in our 

 intellectual anarchy, itself due to metaphysical aberrations. 



* Grant Allen. 



