ABSTRACT
The application of science to social questions is even more recent than its application to individual psychology. There are, it is true, a few directions in which a scientific attitude is to be found as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. Malthus’s theory of population, whether true or false, is certainly scientific. The arguments by which he supports it are not appeals to prejudice, but to population statistics and the expenses of agriculture. Adam Smith and Ricardo are also scientific in their economics. Again, I do not mean to say that the theories they advance are invariably true, but that their outlook and their type of reasoning have the characteristics which distinguish scientific method. From Malthus came Darwin, and from Darwin came Darwinism, which as applied to politics has turned out to be far from scientific. The phrase “survival of the fittest” proved too much for the intellects of those who speculate on social questions. The word “fittest” seems to have ethical implications, from which it follows that the nation, race, and class to which a writer belongs must necessarily be the fittest. Hence we arrive, under the ægis
of a pseudo-Darwinian philosophy, at doctrines such as the Yellow Peril, Australia for the Australians, and the superiority of the Nordic race. On account of the ethical bias, one must view all Darwinian arguments on social questions with the greatest suspicion. This applies not only as between different races, but also as between different classes in the same nation. All Darwinian writers belong to the professional classes, and it is therefore an accepted maxim of Darwinian politics that the professional classes are biologically the most desirable. It follows that their sons ought to get a better education at the public expense than that which is given to the sons of wage-earners. In all such arguments it is impossible to see an application of science to practical affairs. There is merely a borrowing of some of the language of science for the purpose of making prejudice seem respectable.
