F. B. Kaye wrote in his introduction to The Fable of The Bees, Mandeville's great book on society: "Mandeville's repeated insistence on the fact that civilization is the result, not of sudden invention, but of a very slow evolution based on man's actual nature." Mandeville thus advanced the cause of natural selection, what was to become Charles Darwin's dangerous idea, much trumpeted by Thomas Henry Huxley. pp 47 vol 1. ... Nor did he mean that society was organized overnight. To miss this point would be to miss an essential element in Mandeville, which is his precocious feeling for evolution. In a day which lacked historical perspective, he had a real feeling for the gulf of time and effort which divides us from the primitive." pp lxiv.
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F. B. Kaye, Editor of Fable of the Bees, Northwestern University, Chicago, 1923.
Published by Liberty Classics, Indianapolis In 1988 (An exact photographic reproduction of the edition published by Oxford University Press in 1924.)
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