It seems likely, when the application of the principles of evolutionary science to history comes to be fully understood, that we shall have to witness almost as great a revolution in those departments of knowledge which deal with man in society as we have already seen taking place in the entire realm of the lower organic sciences through the development and general application, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the biological theories enunciated by Darwin. It is evident that we are approaching a period when we shall no longer have the same justification as in the past for regarding human history as a bewildering exception to the reign of universal law—a kind of solitary and mysterious island in the midst of the cosmos given over to a strife of forces without clue or meaning. Despite the complexity of the problems encountered in history, we seem to have everywhere presented to us systematic development underlying apparent confusion. In all the phases and incidents of our social annals we are apparently regarding only the intimately related phenomena of a single, vast, orderly process of evolution.

If the explanation of the principles governing the evolution of society which has been given in the preceding chapters is in the main correct, these principles must have an application far too wide to be adequately discussed within the limits to which it is proposed to confine this book. It has been no part of the aim of the writer, in the task he has undertaken, to treat the subject in its relations to that wider field of philosophical inquiry of which it forms a province.