Mandeville on the Seamy Side of Virtue ate selfishness the "cynical" moralists from Hobbes to Samuel Butler and Mr. Veblen have found the effective source of polite and civil society.
The fact of the matter is that Mandeville had by psychological analysis firmly established in his own mind the conception of man and society as products of a complex evolution. He hadn't a doubt that man was an animal of base ancestry and savage relatives. That this conception has haunted mankind from the earliest times is often suggested to us by the poets, who, when they leave off flattering the ladies and depict human nature as it is, show us lions on the throne, foxes at court and wolves, bulls, bears, monkeys and rabbits in the streets. With Mandeville, however, this conception is not poetically but scientifically and philosophically entertained. He works out his corollaries. He applies his ideas to the development of languages. He pries into the physiology of the emotions. He discards all absolute values, and works out a doctrine of pure relativity. Before Malthus and Darwin he meditates on the enormous potential reproductivity of nature, as exemplified in the shad roe; he concludes that the shad, if unchecked, would clog up the seven seas; he perceives that powers which thwart reproduction—pestilence and war—are as necessary to the "balance of nature" as reproduction: he states clearly the necessity of the struggle for existence. Without in the least intending to be a "forward-looking" man he prepares the way for the philosophical radicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose most important distinction is in the part which they assign to conscious purpose in altering the terms of the struggle for existence.
I doubt whether Mandeville suffered much from the
