Principles of western civilisation

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generally accepted without question, there has been deduced the distinctive law of Natural Selection, which, in the words of Darwin, consists of ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” Despite the overwhelming ratio at which life is produced—so great, as we have seen, that even in the case of the slowest breeding animals it has only to be imagined to continue to any appreciable length of time to see that the numbers would exceed all possible conditions of existence—there is, under ordinary circumstances, no perceptible increase in the numbers of any species. The balance of nature is evenly maintained from generation to generation through prolonged periods of time. There must be, therefore, at some point, or indeed at a great number of points, in the life of every individual a tremendous struggle for a place in the categories of life. Here we have what appears to Darwin’s mind to be the doctrine of Malthus on a universal scale. For, “as many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary, however slightly, in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be xzaturally selected.’ From the strong principle of inheritance,

* The close connection between the Darwinian hypothesis (of which the law of Natural Selection as here stated is the essential part) and the system of ideas which the Manchester school represented in England has been remarked on. The law of Natural Selection, in the terms above quoted, was suggested to Darwin by reading Malthus on Population, and in the text of the Origin of Species he describes it as ‘‘the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms” (p. 3). It will be of some interest to keep this fact in view in endeavouring to present to the mind the relationship between the political conceptions of the Manchester school of thought and the development which has since taken place in the Darwinian hypothesis.