16 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC 



bourgeois free thinkers like Clodd and Draper 

 break down. They tacitly assume that in 

 Europe evolution was suspended for over a 

 thousand years ; and all because of the Christ- 

 ian church. They fail to recognize that deeper 

 cause, the medieval form of wealth production, 

 which gave the church its power to repress 

 learning in the interest of the lords of the land, 

 among which the church herself was greatest ; 

 owning as she did one-third of the soil of 

 Europe. 



The bourgeois radical cannot perceive that 

 during this period social processes were being 

 gradually transformed and that an economic 

 foundation was being laid that would make 

 possible the renaissance and put science in an 

 impregnable position, and make the pro- 

 gressive acceptance of evolution inevitable. 

 Engels says : "The Middle Ages were reckoned 

 as a mere interruption of history by a thou- 

 sand years of bararism. The great advances 

 of the Middle Ages — the broadening of 

 European learning, the bringing into existence 

 of great nations, which arose, one after the 

 other, and finally the enormous technical ad- 

 vances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 

 — all this no one saw". 



But it cannot be denied that this was a 

 terrible period for any thinker who had the 



