34 Causes of its Success 



adopt. The latter fights out the struggle for existence 

 to the bitter end, like any other animal; the former 

 devotes his best energies to the object of setting 

 limits to the struggle.^ 



But Huxley's emphasis upon the ethical factors 

 in human society, like Darwin's own theory of 

 social progress, was entirely neglected by those 

 who found in natural selection the justification for 

 the philosophy of force. The tide of opinion in 

 favour of the distorted "social Darwinism" had 

 set in so strongly that attention was paid only to 

 those parts which were favourable to this doctrine 

 — parts which rest upon errors due, as Kropotkin 

 and Novikov have since shown, to a one-sided 

 misreading of the biological struggle and a mis- 

 conception of the primitive life of man. 



On the one hand, then, we have as one of the 

 causes of its success, the appeal which the new 

 doctrine made to some of the most enlightened 

 spirits of the age. On the other hand, there came 

 to it the support of an entirely different group of 

 men, because the philosophy of force responded to 

 the archaic instincts of brutality so deeply em- 

 bedded in the nature of the traditionalist, the 

 routinist, and the ignorant, who still form, un- 

 fortunately so large a proportion of the human 

 race. After the Darwinian theory had been 

 announced, Marshal von Moltke could write with 

 a semblance of scientific authority that war 



' Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, p. 203. 



