SCIENCE AND CULTURE 43 



We may take as another illustration Malthus's 

 doctrine of population. This illustration is all the better 

 for the fact that his actual doctrine is now known to be 

 largely erroneous. It is not his conclusions that are 

 valuable, but the temper and method of his inquiry. 

 As everyone knows, it was to him that Darwin owed an 

 essential part of his theory of natural selection, and 

 this was only possible because Malthus's outlook was 

 truly scientific. His great merit lies in considering man 

 not as the object of praise or blame, but as a part of 

 nature, a thing with a certain characteristic behaviour 

 from which certain consequences must follow. If the 

 behaviour is not quite what Malthus supposed, if the 

 consequences are not quite what he inferred, that may 

 falsify his conclusions, but does not impair the value of 

 his method. The objections which were made when his 

 doctrine was new ^that it was horrible and depressing, 

 that people ought not to act as he said they did, and so 

 on ^were all such as imphed an unscientific attitude of 

 mind ; as against all of them, his calm determination 

 to treat man as a natural phenomenon marks an im- 

 portant advance over the reformers of the eighteenth 

 century and the Revolution. 



Under the influence of Darwinism the scientific atti- 

 tude towards man has now become fairly common, and 

 ^ is to some people quite natural, though to most it is still a 

 difficult and artificial intellectual contortion. There is, 

 however, one study which is as yet almost wholly un- 

 touched by the scientific spirit I mean the study of 

 philosophy. Philosophers and the public imagine that 

 the scientific spirit must pervade pages that bristle with 

 allusions to ions, germ-plasms, and the eyes of shell-fish. 

 But as the devil can quote Scripture, so the philosopher 

 can quote science. The scientific spirit is not an afl[air of 



