Aristocracy and Evolution: A Study of the Rights, the Origin, and the Social Functions of the Wealthier Classes

The interest with which the world in general, throughout the middle portion of this century, has watched the progress of the various positive sciences, would, when we consider how abstruse these sciences are, seem strange and almost inexplicable if it were not for one fact. This fact is the close and obvious bearing which the conclusions of the sciences in question have on traditional Christianity, and, indeed, on any belief in immortality and the divine government of the world. The popular interest in science remains still unabated, but the most careless observer can hardly fail to perceive that the grounds of it are, to a certain extent, very rapidly changing. They are ceasing to be primarily religious, and are becoming primarily social. The theories and discoveries of the savant which are examined with the greatest eagerness are no longer those which affect our prospects of a life in heaven, but those which deal with the possibility of improving our social conditions on earth, and which appeal to us through our sympathies, not with belief or doubt, but with the principles which are broadly contrasted under the names of conservative and revolutionary. Such being the case, it is hardly necessary to observe that science itself has been undergoing a change likewise. The character of the change, however, requires to be briefly specified. From the time when geologists first startled the orthodox by demonstrating that the universe was more than six thousand years old, and that something more than a week had been occupied in the process of its construction, to the time, comparatively recent, during which the genius of Darwin and others was forcing on the world entirely new ideas with regard to the parentage, and presumably the nature of man, there was a certain limit—a certain scientific frontier—at which positive science practically stopped short. Having sedulously examined the materials and structure of the universe, until on the one hand it reached atoms and molecules, it examined, on the other, the first emergence of organic life, and traced its developments till they culminated in the articulate-speaking human being. It brought us, in fact, to man on the threshold of his subsequent history; and there, till very recently, positive science left him. But now there are signs all round us of a new intellectual movement, analogous to that which accompanied the rise of Darwinism, and science once again is endeavouring to enlarge its borders. Having offered us an explanation of the origin of the animalman, it proposes to deal with the existing conditions of society very much as it dealt with the structure of the human body, to exhibit them as the necessary result of certain far-reaching laws and causes, and to deduce our civilisation of to-day from the condition of the primitive savage by the same methods and by the aid of the same theories as those which it employed in deducing the primitive savage from the brutes, and the brutes in their turn from primitive germ or protoplasm. In other words, the great triumph of science during what we may call its physical period has been the establishment of that theory of development which is commonly spoken of as Evolution, and the application of this to the problems of physics and biology. The object of science in entering on what we may call its social period is the application of this same theory to the problems of civilisation and society.