Principles of western civilisation

50 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

Now it will be noticed, if we turn again for a moment to the Orzgin of Speczes, how in this book, and almost to the same extent in the others that followed it, Darwin, in dealing with the effect of Natural Selection operating on individuals engaged in a struggle for existence, carried his examination up to a certain fixed limit and no farther. Beyond this a wide range of phenomena, amongst which may be included reproduction, sex, variation, death, and to some extent heredity, were accepted as being in a sense irresolvable prime causes, beyond which, therefore, scrutiny was not carried. As, however, from this point forward we watch the reach of the law of Natural Selection being slowly extended, we see these phenomena, one after another, being submitted to analysis with surprising results.

To grasp the significance, as regards the subject with which we are dealing, of the movement in modern biology which the Weismann theories as a whole represent, it is necessary, and more especially when the mind is well acquainted with the technical details of the controversies to which these theories have given rise, that attention should be kept continuously fixed on the central principle with which we are here concerned.

The imagination of the early Darwinians had been impressed with the struggle for existence as they perceived it in the immediate foreground. It was the effects on the existing individuals of this ceaseless contemporary struggle which occupied their attention, and became the subject of most of their theories. In the larger view which now begins to prevail, what we see is, as it were, the foreground in which Natural Selection produces