46 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



which Bent ham, the Mills, and the influential school 

 of English utilitarians had long been attempting 

 to realize in the political State, seemed to have 

 become justified at a stroke. The central thesis 

 of Darwin appeared as nothing less than a cul- 

 minating scientific condemnation of all the labour 

 programmes of the West conceived in a spirit of 

 socialism. The prevailing social system, born as it 

 had been in struggle, and resting as it did in the 

 last resort on war and on the toil of an excluded 

 wage-earning proletariat, appeared to have become 

 clothed with a new and final kind of authority. 

 Darwinism seemed to the rulers of civilization to 

 have lifted the veil from life and to have disclosed 

 to the gaze of the time the self-centred struggle of 

 the individual ruthlessly pursuing his own interests, 

 and pursuing them as in the competition of business 

 to the exclusion of all other conceptions, and to 

 have revealed this individual as the basal fact of 

 the world in evolution. 



This was the first phase of the effect of Darwin's 

 conception on civilization. But although Darwinism 

 was a product of the English-speaking peoples it 

 was neither in England nor in the United States 

 that it passed rapidly into the second phase of its 

 influence. In this phase on the continent of Europe 

 the extraordinary position was soon reached in 



