Principles of western civilisation

40 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

lating in various directions under the influence of natural selection, possessed one invariable characteristic. They were those profitable to the actually existing individuals, or to the majority of their kind for the time being.

There can be no doubt under this head. Darwin repeatedly expresses himself in the Ovzg7n of Species in terms which leave us in no obscurity as to his meaning. When he sets out at the beginning of the Origin of Species with a statement of the principle of Natural Selection the terms used are worthy of attention. ‘Any being,” he says, ‘if it vary however slightly in any manner frojfitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.”* The import of the words here put in italics will be obvious; and in all the later references in the Ovzgzx of Species to the effects of the law of Natural Selection the terms used may be seen to be always limited to the same meaning. The significance of this fact, in the relation with which we are here concerned with it, is, that to Darwin, when speaking of the operation of the principle of Natural Selection, the centre of significance was always in the present time. It is the effects on the existing individuals, or at most on their young, that we see he has always in mind. The passages in which this fact is brought out clearly are numerous. Natural Selection, we are told in chap. iv., “acts exclusively by the preservation and accumulation of variations w/zch are beneficial under the organic and tnorganic conditions to which each creature zs exposed at all periods

1 Origin of Species, p. 3.