The concern of Chinese intellectuals with the "idea" of modern science from the West in the transition generation from 1895 to 1923 was fundamentally a concern about "national survival" and modernity. The value and meaning that accrued to science as "method" -- as a "thinking technique" -- and to the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the "science of choice" among Chinese intellectuals of this period, was due to belief or disbelief in the power of these ideas to describe, explain, or solve the problematic of "modernity" in a Chinese context.