It is to demonstrate, or rather to suggest, that "the monopolists of business ability," in spite of their comparative rarity and the importance of the services performed by them, are far from being so rare or so superior to the mass of their contemporaries as they seem to be, that their achievements owe far more than appears on the surface to the co-operation of the average members of society, and that consequently a socialistic society could justly demand and practically secure their services on far easier terms than those which they command at present.
And to such a conclusion the principles of modern evolutionary sociology, as unanimously interpreted by the philosophers of the nineteenth century, may be fairly said to lend the entire weight of their prestige.

Let us, then, consider more carefully what these principles are, with a view to understanding the true scope of their significance.

We shall find that, although undoubtedly true in themselves, the scope of their significance has been very imperfectly understood by the great thinkers to whose talents their elucidation has been due; that these thinkers, in their eagerness to establish a new truth, have at the same time introduced a new confusion; and that it is from the confusion of a truth with a falsehood, rather than from the truth itself, that the socialists of to-day have been here drawing their inspiration.
The confusion in question arises from a failure to see that sociology is concerned with two distinct sets of phenomena, or with one set regarded from two absolutely distinct standpoints.

Thus it is constantly said that man, in the course of ages, has developed civilised societies and the various arts of life--that, beginning as an animal only a little higher than the monkey, he gradually became a builder of cities, a master of the secrets of nature, a philosopher, a poet, a painter of divine pictures.

And from a certain point of view this language is adequate.