Evolutionism

The third of the intellectual influences is that of evolution.* It affected everyone of the social sciences each of which was concerned with the idea of "development". It was believed that the idea of evolution would help people to understand the development in social structures or societies as it had helped the biologists to understand the development in the structure of animals.
The impact of the Charles Darwin,s "Origin of Species", published in 1859, was of course great and further enhanced the appeal of the evolutionary view of things. It should be noted that even before the publication of Darwin's work , Comte, Spencer and Marx had already given shape to the idea of evolution in their literary works. "The important point, in any event, is that the idea or the philosophy of evolution was in the air throughout the century, as profoundly contributory of establishment of sociology as a systematic discipline in the 1830s as to such fields as geology, astronomy, and biology. Evolution was as permeative an idea as the Trinity had been in medieval Europe"