Time & Perspective Quote by Goldwin Smith

Needless to say is doing a lot of work here: Smith is pretending modesty while quietly announcing a revolution. In the late 19th century, to invoke “the doctrine of Evolution” wasn’t just to nod at Darwin; it was to claim modernity, rigor, and an escape hatch from old moralizing history. Smith’s pivot - “or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth” - is the real tell. He’s less interested in biological evolution as a grand theory than in evolution as a permission slip: a new way to study human arrangements as products of gradual change, adaptation, and inherited constraint.

The target is traditional institutional history that treated constitutions, churches, and legal systems as deliberate creations by great men, or as embodiments of timeless principles. Smith is arguing that institutions have lineages. They’re not designed so much as grown, patched, and repurposed; their “present form” is a fossil record of earlier conflicts and compromises. That reframes politics from a debate about ideals into a study of mechanisms: what survives, what mutates, what gets selected out.

There’s also a quieter ideological subtext. By celebrating method over doctrine, Smith sidesteps charges of determinism while still importing evolution’s authority into social analysis. It’s a Victorian power move: dress interpretation up as science, and you can call your opponents sentimental or unmodern. In an era of empire, industrialization, and widening suffrage, the evolutionary lens offered a flattering story about progress and “advanced” societies - even as it risked turning inequality into a natural outcome rather than a political choice.