Principles of western civilisation

1 PROJECTED EFFICIENCY 61

of that deep-seated cause in life which makes it possible for the higher forms to maintain their places only by continuous rivalry and selection, it cannot be said by any stretch of the imagination that the advantage towards which Natural Selection is working is one which is shared in by the existing generation of individuals. With the resulting advantage accruing at a stage always beyond the limit of their existence this cannot be.

Yet in looking back along the road that life has travelled we see at once that, however injurious, or even fatal, to large numbers of the existing individuals at any time may have been the conditions of existence, if such conditions were, nevertheless, those most advantageous to future generations of their kind, Natural Selection must have discriminated in favour of the form of life amongst which they prevailed. The individuals may have had their struggle burdened, their interests sacrificed, the content of their lives curtailed by length and breadth; and yet that form must have come down to us as a winning type, having gradually

the direct product of Natural Selection intimately and directly correlated with an end which has been always in the future, namely, the peopling of the world with the largest possible number of healthy and vigorous descendants. Nay more—and here we have the deep import of the principle—no other zesthetic standard with which such a result was not associated, could, in the long-run, persist simultaneously with it; for, as Mr. Wallace observes, the ‘* extremely rigid action of Natural Selection must render any attempt to select mere ornament utterly nugatory, unless the most ornamented always coincide with ‘the fittest” in every other respect” (Darwinism, p. 295). There can be no doubt as to the direction in which we are travelling in this subject. The firm ground here reached may with advantage be compared by any interested student with the early position occupied by Darwin in the following passage :—‘‘ How it comes that certain colours, sounds, and forms should give pleasure to man and the lower animals,—that is, how the sense of beauty in its simplest form was first acquired,—we do not know any more than how certain odours and flavours were first rendered agreeable” (Origin of Spectes, chap. xv.)