Principles of western civilisation

82 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

of the theory of society which prevailed in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This theory has been set out under the phraseology of modern evolutionary science; but it remains, this fact notwithstanding, in all its characteristic features, practically the same conception of society as that developed by the school of thought which culminated in England in the writings of John Stuart Mill.t

1 It has been a fact tending, beyond doubt, to greatly retard the application of Darwin’s theories to the science of society in England that, apart from Darwin’s own writings, the principal medium through which the evolutionary view has in the past been made to impinge upon the general attention has been the philosophy of Mr. Spencer and the discourses and addresses of the late Professor Huxley. For no close student can fail to see that both writers belong essentially to the pre-Darwinian period of knowledge. It has not been possible for Mr. Spencer to deal with the Darwinian hypothesis in its later and more fundamental applications without recasting a great part of his earlier work, to the conclusions in which these later developments run counter. As regards Huxley, an interesting and significant fact bearing in the same direction has recently come to notice on the publication of his memoirs. It is, that, three years before the publication of Darwin’s Ovigiz of Species, Huxley delivered a discourse at the Royal Institution in London in which the main conception upon which the Darwinian hypothesis was afterwards made to rest, was not only opposed, but treated as inherently absurd. Huxley’s words were as follows :—‘‘ Regard a case of birds, or of butterflies, or examine the shell of an echinus, or a group of foraminifera, sifted out of the first handful of sea-sand. Is it to be supposed for a moment that the beauty of outline and colour of the first, the geometrical regularity of the second, or the extreme variety and elegance of the third, are any good to the animals? that they perform any of the actions of their lives more easily and better for being bright and graceful rather than if they were dull and plain? So, to go deeper, is it conceivable that the harmonious variation of a common plan which we find everywhere in Nature serves any utilitarian purpose? that the innumerable varieties of antelopes, of frogs, of clupeoid fishes, of beetles and bivalve mollusks, of polyzoa, of actinozoa, and hydrozoa, are adaptations to as many different kinds of life, and consequently varying physiological necessities? Such a supposition with regard to the three last, at any rate, would be absurd.

. If we turn to the vegetable world we find it one vast illustration of the same truth. Who has ever dreamed of finding an utilitarian purposein the forms and colours of flowers, in the sculpture of pollen-grains, in the varied figures of the frond of the ferns? What ‘purpose’ is served by the strange numerical relations of the parts of plants, the threes and fives of monocotyledons and dicotyledons?” (Zhe Sctentific Memoirs of T. H. Huxley, vol. i. p. 311-) This passage is very remarkable, as showing how absolutely foreign to Huxley’s mind at this period—he had already established his reputation—was