Adventures of ideas / by Alfred North Whitehead.

  • Alfred North Whitehead
Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Adventures of ideas / by Alfred North Whitehead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    110/412 page 94
    persistently increasing population has been accompanied by an equally persistent rise in the general standard of life. Thus any simple-minded Malthusian correlation of density of population with deficiency in the necessaries of life does not apply. Of course, the stock answer to this conclusion is that the checks, which the leading Malthusians have always explicitly recognized, have intervened to delay the inevitable issue. But Europe, even Western Europe, is a large region, and a thousand years is a long time, about one-sixth of the whole past of civilization within the historical period. The plain truth is that during this period and over that area the so-called checks were such that the Malthusian Law repre¬ sented a possibility, unrealized and of no importance. Also these checks were not even in proportion to the density of the population. For examples, the plagues depended mainly on insanitary habits, and the densities of rats, insects, and microbes. At the time of the Black Death, a Malthusian discussing the excessive birth rate would have been talking irrelevant nonsense. Soap, water, and drains were the key to the situation. The Thirty Years’ War halved the population of Germany. It was due to many causes, a few creditable, but most of them discreditable. An excessive population in Germany has never been mentioned among them. Of course there was plenty of misery in the Middle Ages, and during the Renaissance. For example, we read of peasants’ risings. But this misery certainly did not prevail in any proportion to density of population. Thus, in the early years of the sixteenth century, Flanders which was thickly populated was notably more prosperous than the country- districts in Germany where, at that time, there was a rising of the peasants. Of course the reasons for this contrast are too obvious to be worth mentioning. But among these reasons, the fact emerges that the Malthusian Law is largely
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