Principles of western civilisation

36 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.” *

It is, in short, to the accumulation through infinite tracts of time of small variations useful or beneficial to the organism, acquired in a ceaseless rivalry, and in an environment continually changing, that we owe the extraordinarily varied and complex forms of life in the teeming world around us at the present time. As the result of the ceaseless operation of such a cause, it has come about, as Darwin points out, that “the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys.”” It may be metaphorically said, he continues in another striking passage, “that Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinising throughout the world the slightest variations—rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.” *

In all this it is necessary to keep clearly in view certain governing principles to which all others are subordinate. The first tendency of all elementary

1 Origin of Species, Intro. 2 (bid. c. ili. 3 Jozd. c. iv.