Principles of western civilisation

44 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

work and research which, since Darwin’s death, has been enlarging the scope of his work, it may be distinguished that there has been a gradual but certain shifting of what may be called the centre of significance in the evolutionary conception. It is not so much that there has been a growing tendency to emphasise the struggle for the life of the young; or the struggle for the life of the majority of the species as at any time existing ; or the struggle for the life of the social aggregate—as against the struggle for the life of the individual gua individual. All these features have received deserved and increasing attention. But they do not, in principle, carry the law of Natural Selection beyond the point at which Darwin left it. That is to say, the centre of significance in the evolutionary process is, in such discussions, still left, in effect, where Darwin placed it, namely, in the present! The principle with which we are here concerned has a different and altogether wider significance.”

One of the first contributions which may be said to have directed general attention to the importance of the view which it is desired here to emphasise,

1 In a passage in the Origin of Species, Darwin comes almost in sight of the principle here discussed. Speaking of the term “struggle for existence,” as used in a large sense, he says: ‘‘I should premise that I use this term in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in having progeny” (c. iii.) The idea which this passage covers was, however, very little developed, and of the larger conception of the projection of the controlling centre of the evolutionary process, altogether beyond the concerns and interests of the existing individuals, we do not come in sight.

* There is a close connection, as we shall see later, between the effort which has tended to emphasise this feature of the evolutionary hypothesis and that utilitarian movement in English thought, referred to in the last chapter, which has reached its most complete expression in Herbert Spencer’s philosophy. The fundamental conception in each case is that the controlling meaning of the evolutionary process lies within the horizon of the present.

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