Principles of western civilisation

1 PROJECTED EFFICIENCY 43

effectively subserve the interests of the largest majority. Yet this majority in the processes of life can never be in the present. It is always, of necessity, the majority which constitutes the long roll of the yet unborn generations. Other things being equal, that is to say, the winning qualities in the evolutionary process must of necessity be those qualities by which the interests of the existing individuals have been most effectively subordinated to those of the generations yet to be born.

It cannot, in short, have been simply the qualities useful to the individuals in a mere struggle for present existence which have directed the process of Natural Selection as a whole. When that process is viewed in operation over a long period this fact becomes evident. In the strenuous zons of time, during which progress followed its upward path, it must have been, on the whole, in the evolution of the qualities contributing to the interests of the vast majority in the future that the controlling meaning of the deeper life-processes always centred. It must have been in the interests of this majority that Natural Selection, in the longrun, continuously discriminated. It must have been always these infinitely larger interests in the future that overweighted all others. Nay, we may go so far as to say that, under the law of Natural Selection, as we come to understand it in this light, the interests of the individual in those adjustments “profitable to itself,” which filled so large a place in the minds of the early Darwinians, have actually no place, except in so far as they are included in, and have contributed to, this larger end in the future.

Accordingly, if we follow now the course of the