Principles of western civilisation

ii PROJECTED EFFICIENCY 51

the most important results in the struggle of life projected into the vast stretches of the future. It is those apparently irresolvable phenomena of reproduction, sex, variation, death, and heredity,’ which become in this respect the centres of struggle around which the main problems of efficiency in the drama of evolution are worked out by the operation of the law of Natural Selection. In the process of selection from which the curtain now risés, we see not only individuals, but whole generations—nay, entire species and types, unconsciously pitted against each other for long ages in a struggle in which efficiency zz the future is the determining quality ; and in which only the types in which the problems involved have progressed farthest towards solution remain at last to transmit their efficiency. We are, in short, brought within view of a wide range of phenomena which Darwin had not discussed, and, in all probability, had not imagined. In the struggle, as we now begin to see it, the interests of the individual and the present alike are presented as overlaid by the interests of a majority which is always in the future. We behold the whole drama of progress in life becoming instinct, as it were, with a meaning which remains continually projected beyond the content of the present. In the next step in the inquiry we see the principle of Natural Selection carried right into the ‘It is a remarkable feature of recent biology that, while the distinctive Darwinian principle of Natural Selection has come to dominate all our conceptions of the evolutionary process, Darwin’s position, in many cases, has been already left far behind, and mostly by the application of his own principle. Compare, for instance, Darwin’s position on such subjects as inheritance, sex, variation, heredity, in his theories of heredity and pangenesis,

in Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii. ch. xxvii. ; Descent of Man, ch. vii.-x. ; and Origin of Species, ch. i.-iv.