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wrong. In spite of the efforts
of Grant Allen to set him right, he would have accepted Darwin as the
discoverer of Evolution, of Heredity, and of modification of species by
Selection. For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a
Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a
standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were
Galileo's demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the
earth is a moon of the sun, Newton's theory of gravitation, Sir Humphry
Davy's invention of the safety-lamp, the discovery of electricity, the
application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. It was
just the same in other subjects. Thus Nietzsche, by the two or three who
had come across his writings, was supposed to have been the first man
to whom it occurred that mere morality and legality and urbanity lead
nowhere, as if Bunyan had never written Badman. Schopenhauer was
credited with inventing the distinction between the Covenant of Grace
and the Covenant of Works which troubled Cromwell on his deathbed.
People talked as if there had been no dramatic or descriptive music
before Wagner; no impressionist painting before Whistler; whilst as to
myself, I was finding that the surest way to produce an effect of daring
innovation and originality was to revive the ancient attraction of long
rhetorical speeches; to stick closely to the methods of Molière; and to
lift characters bodily out of the pages of Charles Dickens.
THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-DARWINIANS
This particular sort of ignorance does not always or often matter. But in

Darwin's case it did matter. If Darwin had really led the world at one
bound from the book of Genesis to Heredity, to Modification of
Species by Selection, and to Evolution, he would have been a
philosopher and a prophet as well as an eminent professional naturalist,
with geology as a hobby. The delusion that he had actually achieved
this feat did no harm at first, because if people's views are sound, about
evolution or anything else, it does not make two straws difference
whether they call the revealer of their views Tom or Dick. But later on
such apparently negligible errors have awkward consequences. Darwin
was given an imposing reputation as not only an Evolutionist, but as
the Evolutionist, with the immense majority who never read his books.
The few who never read any others were led by them to concentrate
exclusively on Circumstantial Selection as the explanation of all the
transformations and adaptations which were the evidence for Evolution.
And they presently found themselves so cut off by this specialization
from the majority who knew Darwin only by his spurious reputation,
that they were obliged to distinguish themselves, not as Darwinians, but
as Neo-Darwinians.
Before ten more years had elapsed, the Neo-Darwinians were
practically running current Science. It was 1906; I was fifty; I
published my own view of evolution in a play called Man and
Superman; and I found that most people were unable to understand
how I could be an Evolutionist and not a Neo-Darwinian, or why I
habitually derided Neo-Darwinism as a ghastly idiocy, and would fall
on its professors slaughterously in public discussions. It was in the
hope of making me clear the matter up that the Fabian Society, which
was then organizing a series of lectures on Prophets of the Nineteenth
Century, asked me to deliver a lecture on the prophet Darwin. I did so;
and scraps of that lecture, which was never published, variegate these
pages.
POLITICAL INADEQUACY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL
Ten more years elapsed. Neo-Darwinism in politics had produced a
European catastrophe of a magnitude so appalling, and a scope so
unpredictable, that as I write these lines in 1920, it is still far from

certain whether our civilization will survive it. The circumstances of
this catastrophe, the boyish cinema-fed romanticism which made it
possible to impose it on the people as a crusade, and especially the
ignorance and errors of the victors of Western Europe when its violent
phase had passed and the time for reconstruction arrived, confirmed a
doubt which had grown steadily in my mind during my forty years
public work as a Socialist: namely, whether the human animal, as he
exists at present, is capable of solving the social problems raised by his
own aggregation, or, as he calls it, his civilization.
COWARDICE OF THE IRRELIGIOUS
Another observation I had made was that goodnatured unambitious
men are cowards when they have no religion. They are dominated and
exploited not only by greedy and often half-witted and half-alive
weaklings who will do anything for cigars, champagne, motor cars, and
the more childish and selfish uses of money, but by able and sound
administrators who can do nothing else with