n 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 c