Principles of western civilisation

11 PROJECTED EFFICIENCY 55

The deep significance of the central idea here outlined will become clear if the mind is allowed to dwell upon it. We see the early Darwinian conception—of the individual in the struggle for existence, and of its relation to advantages secured therein ‘profitable to itself’—being overlaid by a larger meaning. It was evident that when we conceived the law of Natural Selection operating through unlimited periods of time, and concerned with the indefinitely larger interests of numbers always infinite and always in the future, that we had in view a principle of which there had been no clear perception at first; namely, a principle of inherent necessity in the evolutionary process compelling ever towards the sacrifice on a vast scale of the present and the individual in the interests of the future and the universal. The central phenomenon with which life has ever been associated in the human mind has been that of the death of the individual. But here we had this phenomenon presented to us at an early stage in the evolutionary process as the fundamental expression of this principle of the sacrifice of the individual, underlying from the outset the vast progression which life had begun to make upwards.

In recent biological thought from this point forward, we may be said to be in full view of the

cumbersome and least efficient method (if we can imagine it as having been possible) of obtaining this continuous adjustment would be where it had to take place in the actual person of a complex individual endowed with indefinite length of life; (2) that on the other hand the most direct and efficient adjustment would take place by selection where the number of effective generations was largest; that is to say, where the life of each individual was limited to the time necessary for reaching maturity and for the production and efficient equipment of offspring. It is this direct path that appears to have been followed in life.