Principles of western civilisation

ba PROJECTED EFFICIENCY AL

of life.”* Natural Selection, he points out later, ‘only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life.”® And in the concluding chapter of the Ovzgzn of Species, in which the progressive character of the theory of evolution he has expounded is emphasised, the fact is again insisted on that the object throughout has been to show that Natural Selection works solely by and for the good of each being.

It may be readily distinguished from this, and a large class of similar evidence, that Darwin regarded the law of Natural Selection, as it operated throughout life, simply in its relation to the interests of the individuals taking part in the struggle for existence as it went on at any particular time. The meaning of the process of progress and development, as he conceived it in life, had reference, therefore, solely to the interests of the individuals who were engaged in maintaining a place in this rivalry for the time being.* All biological development, that is to say, had relation to the qualities necessary to securing the individual’s own place or that of its young, in this contemporary struggle for existence. The whole drama of progress in life was, in short, regarded by him as proceeding in the direction, and through the medium, of the qualities contributing to success and survival in a kind of free fight amongst the individuals of each

1 Origin of Species, p. 97. 2 Tbid. p. 98. * [bid. p. 428.

* The process of evolution was, Darwin considered, a process of progress ; but it was progress regarded by him strictly in the light of the individual’s welfare in, or relations to, existing conditions. ‘It leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life” (cf. Origin of Species, p. 103).