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condition is realised in the degree that fruitful, that is to say, widely imitated, agricultural or
industrial inventions, and the equally fruitful discovery of new lands promote the world-wide
circulation of the most inventive and, at the same time, the most imitative races. Let us suppose that
all these conditions are combined and that they are fulfilled in the highest degree. Then, wherever a
happy initiative might show itself in the whole mass of humanity, its transmission by imitation would
be almost instantaneous, like the propagation of a wave in a perfectly elastic medium. We are
approaching this strange ideal. Already, in certain special phases, where the most essential of the
conditions which I have indicated happen to be combined, social life reveals the reality of the
aforesaid tendency. We see it, for example, in the world of scholars, who, although they are widely
scattered, are in constant touch with one another through multiple international communications. We
see it, too, in the perpetual and universal contact of merchants. Haeckel said in an address delivered
in 1882 on the success of Darwin’s theories: “The prodigious influence which the decisive victory of
the revolutionary idea exercises over all the sciences, an influence which grows in geometric
progression year by year, opens out to us the most consoling perspectives.” In fact, the success of
Darwin and Spencer has been amazingly swift.