466 Darwinism and Sociology 
this attitude. Take for instance the first part of The Descent of 
Man: it is an accumulation of typical facts, all tending to diminish 
the distance between us and our brothers, the lower animals. One 
might say that the naturalist had here taken as his motto, “Who- 
soever shall exalt himself shall be abased ; and he that shall humble 
himself shall be exalted.” Homologous structures, the survival in 
man of certain organs of animals, the rudiments in the animal of 
certain human faculties, a multitude of facts of this sort, led Darwin 
to the conclusion that there is no ground for supposing that the 
“king of the universe” is exempt from universal laws. Thus belief 
in the imperium in imperio has been, as it were, whittled away by 
the progress of the naturalistic spirit, itself continually strengthened 
by the conquests of the natural sciences. The tendency may, indeed, 
drag the social sciences into overstrained analogies, such, for instance, 
as the assimilation of societies to organisms. But it will, at least, 
have had the merit of helping sociology to shake off the pre-con- 
ception that the groups formed by men are artificial, and that 
history is completely at the mercy of chance. Some years before 
the appearance of The Origin of Species, Auguste Comte had 
pointed out the importance, as regards the unification of positive 
knowledge, of the conviction that the social world, the last refuge 
of spiritualism, is itself subject to determinism. It cannot be doubted 
that the movement of thought which Darwin’s discoveries promoted 
contributed to the spread of this conviction, by breaking down the 
traditional barrier which cut man off from Nature. 
But Nature, according to modern naturalists, is no immutable 
thing: it is rather perpetual movement, continual progression. 
Their discoveries batter a breach directly into the Aristotelian notion 
of species; they refuse to see in the animal world a collection of 
immutable types, distinct from all eternity, and corresponding, as 
Cuvier said, to so many particular thoughts of the Creator. Darwin 
especially congratulated himself upon having been able to deal this 
doctrine the coup de grace: immutability is, he says, his chief 
enemy ; and he is concerned to show—therein following up Lyell’s 
work—that everything in the organic world, as in the inorganic, is 
explained by insensible but incessant transformations. “Nature 
makes no leaps”—“Nature knows no gaps”: these two dicta 
form, as it were, the two landmarks between which Darwin’s idea 
of transformation is worked out. That is to say, the development of 
Darwinism is calculated to further the application of the philosophy 
of Becoming to the study of human institutions. 
The progress of the natural sciences thus brings unexpected 
reinforcements to the revolution which the progress of historical 
discipline had begun. The first attempt to constitute an actual 
