Principles of western civilisation

Ir PROJECTED EFFICIENCY 37

criticism is to find in life itself internal causes for development or divergence along certain lines. But we must never lose sight of the tremendous power and universality of the agencies at work." We must never forget the reach of the ever recurring process of selection ; that the increase of life is infinite; that only the few are selected ; and that the selection is determined by some cause in every case.” In all the controversies between the Darwinians and the older naturalists, who saw “laws of growth” projecting themselves in all directions through life, the consistent tendency of the discussion has been to show how, whether such laws exist or not, they must have coincided with the fittest in every other respect, or else they would have been overruled or rendered nugatory.* In the processes of life extending over vast stretches of time, we must, in short, consider the law to have been always the same. To put it in Mr. Wallace’s words: ‘The best organised, or the most healthy, or the most active, or the best protected, or the most intelligent, will inevitably, in the long-run, gain an advantage over those which are inferior in these qualities—that is, the fittest will survive.“ And they will tend to transmit to their descendants in cumulative degree the qualities upon which that fitness depended. This, in brief recapitulation, is the outline of the Darwinian theory of biological evolution, as it has stood the test of attack and examination from in-

? Darwinism, by A. R. Wallace, p. 122.

2 [bid. 123.

3 See in this respect A. R. Wallace’s striking argument as to the preponderance of Natural Selection over sexual preference (Darwznzsm, c. X.).

* Darwinism, p. 123.