44 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



1905, Sir William Huggins said of the instantaneous 

 revolution it produced : " The accumulated tension 

 burst upon the mind of the whole intelligent world 

 with a suddenness and an overwhelming force for 

 which the strongest material metaphors are poor and 

 inadequate. . . . In a way to which history furnishes 

 no parallel the opinions of mankind may be said 

 to have changed in a day." The change, more- 

 over, produced by the Darwinian hypothesis 

 was not simply one of detail. The revolution 

 seemed to involve the reversal of a position 

 fundamental in Western thought which, to use 

 Sir William Huggins' simile, " like a keystone 

 brought down with it an arch of connected 

 beliefs " that for centuries had formed part of 

 the permanent life inheritance of the civilization 

 of the West. 



Darwin's presentation of the evolution of the 

 world as the product of natural selection in never- 

 ceasing war as a product, that is to say, of a struggle 

 hi which the individual efficient in the fight for his 

 own interests was always the winning type touched 

 the profoundest depths of the psychology of the 

 West. The idea seemed to present the whole 

 order of progress in the world as the result of a 

 purely mechanical and materialistic process resting 

 on force. In so doing it was a conception which 



