ABSTRACT
D. G. Ritchie’s syncretic doctrine of “Idealist Evolutionism” could explain social advance in terms of rational, not natural, selection – in tems of reflection, foresight and voluntary change rather than blind and brutal natural processes – because, he said, G. W. F. Hegel and Darwin both recognized the operation of final causes in the Aristotelian sense. Ritchie’s easiness with naturalistic doctrines, such as utilitarianism, led him away from the Hegelian notion that development is not an open-ended process but a process of recovery in which we know enough to know the end by looking back over the history of the world. Ritchie proceeded, with few theoretical qualms, from the organicist conception of society to its alleged practical consequences of increased collectivism in public policy-making. The Green-Bosanquet brand of idealism stressed the creative role of individual and, even more, collective moral endeavour, frequently in defiance of or in uneasy alliance with the historicist determinism of Hegel’s world spirit.
