Preface.--Science, ideology, and world view.--Objectives and methods in intellectual history.--The Kuhnian paradigm and the Darwinian revolution in natural history.--Biology and social theory in the nineteenth century.--Darwin as a social evolutionist.--Darwinism as a world view.--From Huxley to Huxley.--Postscript.

A coherent treatment of the flow of ideas throughout Darwin's works, this volume presents a unified theoretical system that explains Darwin's investigations, evaluating the literature from a historical, scientific, and philosophical perspective.