No matter: he exposed the
bourgeoisie and made an end of its moral prestige. That was enough: like
Darwin he had for the moment the World Will by the ear. Marx had, too,
what Darwin had not: implacability and a fine Jewish literary gift,
with terrible powers of hatred, invective, irony, and all the bitter
qualities bred, first in the oppression of a rather pampered young
genius (Marx was the spoilt child of a well-to-do family) by a social
system utterly uncongenial to him, and later on by exile and poverty.
Thus Marx and Darwin between them toppled over two closely related
idols, and became the prophets of two new creeds.
WHY DARWIN PLEASED THE PROFITEERS ALSO
But how, at this rate, did Darwin succeed with the capitalists too? It
is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is
preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. The
explanation is that Darwinism was so closely related to Capitalism that
Marx regarded it as an economic product rather than as a biological
theory. Darwin got his main postulate, the pressure of population on
the available means of subsistence, from the treatise of Malthus
on Population, just as he got his other postulate of a practically
unlimited time for that pressure to operate from the geologist Lyell,
who made an end of Archbishop Ussher's Biblical estimate of the age
of the earth as 4004 B.
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