The rise of modern science seen in the triumph of Newtonian physics created a distinct world view that was quickly seen to be problematical by many philosophers, among them Kant, who initiated a revolution in thought that challenged the metaphysical claims of both the philosophers and scientists. This 'crisis of the Enlightenment' resulted in a transformation of philosophy, and a new perspective on the difficulties of reductionism, and yet the nineteenth century proceeded in many quarters as if this episode had never occurred. The result is the triumph of positivism, and its clear influence on the rising science of evolution, visible in the coming of Darwinism. 

The nineteenth century produced an immense proliferation of the methods of scientific reductionism in the biological and social sciences, as the onset of positivism led the way to a monolithic consolidation of scientific viewpoints. A symbolic influence is seen in the figure of Comte, and his somewhat idiosyncratic Positivism, which influenced Darwin at the early stage of his career. 

It is significant that the formulation of Darwinism and the so-called Age of Positivism followed directly in the wake of the collapse of the great era of German philosophy. The end of the reign of Hegelianism, which began with Kant, was very sudden and the history of the 1840’s shows us the drama of Feuerbach and Marx challenging the legacy of idealism and championing the need for sciences of society. This period produced a clear delineation of the human and natural sciences, with a challenge to the reductionist implications of the expanding scientific revolution. A kind of amnesia has overtaken science in the stubborn regression, fueled by spectacular, but misleading, technological wonders, to reductionist obsessions dressed up in scientific methodological jargon. It is nonetheless true that Darwinism thrived on this sense of the epochal transition of modernity attempting to establish the foundations of a new age of secularism. This is not an unreasonable view, once its tacit assumptions are brought out. The problem is Darwin's selectionist metaphysics, which cannot sustain the task of defining secularism. A strong case can be made for the 'new age of science', but this is not something fixed or defined by a passing phase of evolutionary theory. 

The earlier context of the idea of evolution in the generation before Darwin shows a broader spectrum of views gestating on the threshold of a science of biology. The focus on positivism makes us forget the immense era of philosophical flowering in the German Enlightenment, whose conclusion in the generation of Marx and Feuerbach foretells the downshifting character of the next generation of scientific methodologies. The moment of the birth of the idea of evolution produced a rich field of thinkers. Kant and the teleomechanists, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, the school of Hegelian Naturphilosophie, Schopenhauer, the embryologists, these and other figures are grappling with the implications of the new evolutionary perspective, and the question remains whether Darwin’s theory did not diminish this complex field of his predecessors. The dialectic of materialists and idealists, mediated between such figures as Kant and the renewed Spinozism of the Hegelians, produced a universe of thought more solid than the watered down collision of naturalism and spiritualism characteristic of the current Darwin debate. 

A philosophy of history such as Comte’s becomes a kind of historicism, to use the phrase of Karl Popper, as it seems to make a prediction about the future, and this sense pervades the ideological futurism of the Scientific Revolution. But we may be in for surprises, as that critic of historicism, Karl Popper, pointed out. And for good Kantian reasons, the age of 'metaphysics' might prove more enduring than reductionists might think. Man’s metaphysical limitations are themselves evolutionary, and it is merely an assumption that man is sufficiently evolved to grasp his own evolution. The irony is that man's propensity for metaphysics might endure as long as man, in his current phase of evolution, remains man. These metaphysical limits are an evolutionary aspect of human nature. The point here is that Darwinism has been taken as a defining shibboleth of modernism, its overthrow a postmodern battle against secularism. But the theoretical reserve potential of the idea of evolution far outstrips what should have been taken as the operational hypothesis in a dialectical research program, the hypothesis of natural selection.  

In this context the triumph of the theory of natural selection became a driving force to legitimate an immense passage of culture across a threshold but in the process upheld a kind of naïvete about culture, history, and evolution itself. The mechanization of the principles of biology under the reductionist perspectives of positivistic science blinded its champions to the sudden contraction of thought created by their own advance. Just as science wished to take over a sudden narrowing of vision occurred, and the result has produced many false starts, bogus paradigms in social science, and the restive underground of puzzled dissenters watching the triumph of secularism turn into a nest of adders. Many early critics of Darwin 's work, dismissed in contempt in the rhetoric of Darwinians, even as they moved toward acceptance of evolution, saw immediately the many problems with the account of natural selection that Darwin provided. In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century Darwin ’s theory was almost in eclipse and it wasn’t until the onset of the new genetic science in the wake of the rediscovery of Mendel’s work that natural selection was able to make a comeback.