CHAPTER III

NATURAL SELECTION AND THE LAW OF LOVE

“Truth justifies herself; and as she dwells With hope, who would not follow where she leads?” Wordsworth.

“La plus haute tâche de l'action morale est le travail pour le bien des générations futures.”--Forel.

Before looking more closely than we are commonly apt to do at the meaning of the phrases “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest,” let us exercise the right of man the moral being, as distinguished from man the scientist or observer of Nature, to pass ethical judgments upon the facts which it is the business of all the sciences, except ethics itself, merely to record and interpret in and for themselves. We are beginning at last, half a century after the publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859, to realise the power of the law of selection; what is the moral judgment which is to be passed upon it? In a passage from the last page of Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, we find words which may be quoted on both sides: “When we think of the myriads of years of the Earth's past, during which have arisen and passed away low forms of creatures, small and great, which, _murdering and being murdered, have gradually evolved_,[5] how shall we answer the question--To what end?”

“Murdering and being murdered” suggests the adverse, and “have gradually evolved,” the favourable, ethical judgment.

Many thinkers, finding Nature “so careless of the single life,” finding the murderous struggle for existence the dominant fact of the history of the living world, return an adverse verdict. Amongst them are to be found not merely those who are inclined, by temperament or imperfect education, to rebellion against any conclusions of science, but also, as we saw in the second chapter, such a great biologist as Huxley. In another part of the lecture already cited he says that the Stoics failed to see

“... that cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature. The logic of facts was necessary to convince them that the cosmos works through the lower nature of man, not for righteousness, but against it.... The practice of that which is ethically best--what we call goodness or virtue--involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence.”

In other words, honesty is the _worst_ policy: and to worship natural selection is to deify the devil.

The reader will realise that, if we are to succeed in establishing the claim of natural selection to be the natural model upon which those who desire the progress of society are to base their policy, it is necessary to controvert the doctrine that natural selection is an anti-moral process. But let us hear the other side.

The directly contrary view, then, is taken that though, truly enough, there has been and is much “murdering and being murdered,” yet organisms “have gradually evolved” towards fitness for their surroundings, or the _milieu environnant_ of Lamarck, which we translate environment; and that since fitness or adaptation obviously makes for happiness, and since the moral being man has himself been thus evolved, the process of natural selection, “murdering and being murdered” notwithstanding, is essentially beneficent.

The controversy is embittered and complicated by the fact that ultimate questions of religion and philosophy are involved. Is the Universe moral, as Emerson asserted it was, or is it immoral? A recent opponent of the orthodox creed of a benevolent Deity teaches that “The Lesson of Evolution” is to disprove the idea of benevolence behind or in Nature: “The story of life has been a story of pain and cruelty of the most ghastly description.” The age-long fact of “murdering and being murdered” is the weapon with which he attacks the theist: who, _per contra_, points to the beneficent result, the exquisite adaptation of all species to the circumstances of their life, and the evolution of love itself.

We may remind ourselves of those great lines of Mr. George Meredith,

“... sure reward We have whom knowledge crowns; Who see in mould the rose unfold, _The soul through blood and tears_.”

The one camp points to the “blood and tears” and asks for a verdict accordingly. The other points to “the soul” as their product, and asks for a verdict accordingly. But surely we need only to have the case fairly stated, in order to realise that the “blood and tears” are true but only half the truth, “the soul” true but only half the truth. Natural Selection is a colossal paradox--the doing evil that good may come. The evil is undoubtedly done, and the good undoubtedly comes. Is not this the only verdict that is in consonance with all the facts? Is it not less than philosophic to look at the process alone, or to look at the result alone? Is any real end to be served by the incessant cry that we should keep our eyes fixed on the “blood and tears” alone, or on “the soul” alone? Is not the poet right when he says that the sure reward of knowledge is not to see either half of the truth as if it were the whole, but to see unfold “the soul through blood and tears?”

Any attempt to cast up accounts between the evil of the process and the good of the result--especially any attempt based on the assumption that the process has yet achieved its final result--would be not only premature in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but would be irrelevant to our present enquiry. I certainly am with those who repudiate as misleading Mill's description of Nature as a “vast slaughter-house,” and will declare that, apart from self-conscious and supremely sensitive man, it is easy to exaggerate the misery and to minimise the joy of the sub-human world. But our business here is with the process and its results in man himself, in whom alone are possible the heights of ecstasy and the depths of agony: and the thesis--the sublime thesis, we may avouch--of the present discussion is that, whatever the balance between the evil of the process of Natural Selection and the good of its results in the natural state, yet when it is transmuted, as it may be, by the moral intelligence of man, according to the principles of race-culture or eugenics, the good of the result can be attained, more abundantly and incomparably more rapidly, than ever heretofore, _whilst the evil of the process can be abolished altogether_. True or false, is this not a sublime thesis?

=Nature must be cruel to be kind.=--If organic fitness or adaptation to the circumstances of life is to be secured, Nature must choose for future parents, out of every new generation, only those whose inborn characters make for this adaptation, and who, in virtue of the fact we call heredity, will tend to transmit this fitness to their offspring. Now it is often convenient to personify Nature, but we must not be misled. The process is really an automatic, not an intelligently directed one. In order that it shall be possible, certain conditions must obtain. The choice or selection depends not merely upon the provision of a variety from which to choose--this being afforded by what is called variation, which is the correlative of heredity, both being obvious facts in any well-filled nursery--but also upon the production of _more_ young creatures than there is or will be room for. (If there be room for all, so that all survive, there can be no selection, and instead of survival of the fittest there will be indiscriminate survival.) The choice is effected amongst this superfluity by an internecine “struggle for existence”: hence the “murdering and being murdered,” hence the “blood and tears.” The motor force of the whole process may be symbolised as the “will to life,” ever seeking to realise itself in more abundance and with more success--with more and more approximation to perfect adaptation. The will to death is no ingredient of the will to life. Nature is, so to say, by no means desirous of the process of “murdering and being murdered”: very much on the contrary. It is life, more life, and fitter life, that is her desire: the “murdering and being murdered,” the “blood and tears” are no part of her aim. But they are inevitable, though lamentable, if her aim is to be realised. She _must_ be cruel to be kind--a little cruel to be very kind.[6]

It is _imaginable_, though no more, that natural selection, in certain circumstances, might have worked otherwise: the penalty for less as against greater fitness might _imaginably_ have been not death but merely sterility--the denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal of race-culture. Had this been possible, Nature could have effected her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without having incidentally to mete out premature death to such an overwhelming majority of all her creatures. But, actually, this was not possible: and, unless the end was to be sacrificed, Nature was compelled--to keep up the figure--summarily to kill right and left. Permitted to reach maturity, the unfit as well as the fit would multiply; and since, in general, the lower the form of life the greater its fertility, the species could not possibly advance, or even maintain itself at the level already gained.

To drop the figure, the process is a mechanical and automatic one, and its appalling wastefulness and indisputable cruelty are inevitably involved, whilst it so remains.

=Intelligence may be kind to be kinder.=--But--and here is the great event--this mechanical, automatic, non-intelligent process has latterly given birth to intelligence, the moral intelligence of man: and the question now to be answered is, what modification can intelligence effect in the moral-immoral process that has created it? Must intelligence abrogate that process altogether, as Huxley declares, on the grounds of its murderous methods? Must intelligence simply look on, recognise, but not reconstruct? Must intelligence reverse the process--as indeed it is now doing in many cases--so that in the new environment of which itself is a factor, that which formerly was unfitness shall become fitness, and _vice versâ_? _Or_ is it conceivable that intelligence can transmute the process, so that, whilst hitherto mechanical, automatic, and therefore inevitably murderous, it shall become _intelligent_, pressing towards the sublime end, and reforming the murderous means?

Hear Mr. Galton himself (_Sociological Papers_, 1905, p. 52):--

“Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays the awe-inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil ... it is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error.... Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of directing its course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a distance as great as that of the moon.”

Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes Lecture[7] for 1905: “Man is ... a product of the definite and orderly evolution which is universal, a being resulting from and driven by the one great nexus of mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone, face to face with that relentless mechanism. It is his destiny to understand and to control it.”

“Nature's insurgent son,” Professor Lankester calls man in this lecture: and yet again there recurs that mighty aphorism of Bacon, which might well be printed on every page of these chapters, “Nature is to be commanded only by obeying her.” The struggle for existence is the terrible fact of Nature, but is only a means to an end. It is our destiny to command the end whilst _humanising_ the means.

=The struggle for existence.=--The ideal of eugenics or race-culture is to abolish the brutal elements of the struggle for existence whilst gaining its great end. The nature of this struggle is commonly misapprehended and, as I cannot improve upon the words of Professor Lankester, I shall freely use them in the attempt to show what it really is. He says:--

“The world, the earth's surface, is practically full, that is to say, fully occupied. Only one pair of young can grow up to take the place of the pair--male and female--which have launched a dozen, or it may be as many as a hundred thousand, young individuals on the world.... The ‘struggle for existence’ of Darwin is the struggle amongst all the superabundant young of a given species, in a given area, to gain the necessary food, to escape voracious enemies, and gain protection from excesses of heat, cold, moisture, and dryness. One pair in the new generation--only one pair--survive for every parental pair. Animal population does not increase: ‘Increase and multiply’ has never been said by Nature to her lower creatures. Locally, and from time to time, owing to exceptional changes, a species may multiply here and decrease there; but it is important to realise that the ‘struggle for existence’ in Nature--that is to say, among the animals and plants of this earth untouched by man--is a desperate one, however tranquil and peaceful the battlefield may appear to us. The struggle for existence takes place, not as a clever French writer glibly informs his readers, between different species, but between individuals of the same species, brothers and sisters and cousins.... In Nature's struggle for existence, death, immediate obliteration, is the fate of the vanquished, whilst the only reward to the victors--few, very few, but rare and beautiful in the fitness which has carried them to victory--is the permission to reproduce their kind--to carry on by heredity to another generation the specific qualities by which they triumphed.

“It is not generally realised how severe is the pressure and competition in Nature--not between different species, but between the immature population of one and the same species, precisely because they are of the same species and have exactly the same needs.... A distinctive quality in the beauty of natural productions (in which man delights) is due to the unobtrusive yet tremendous slaughter of the unfit which is incessantly going on and the absolute restriction of the privilege of parentage to the happy few who attain to the standard described as ‘the fittest.’”

=The survival of the fittest.=--Now let us look closely at this most famous of all Spencer's phrases, “the survival of the fittest,” and try to understand its full and exact meaning. There is no phrase in any language so frequently misinterpreted. Even a writer who should know better makes this mistake. Mr. H. G. Wells speaks[8] of “that same lack of a fine appreciation of facts that enabled Herbert Spencer to coin those two most unfortunate terms _Evolution_ and the _Survival of the Fittest_. The implication is that the _best_ reproduces and survives. Now really it is the _better_ that survives and not the _best_.” What the correction is supposed to signify I do not know, but the whole passage is nonsense. The implication is neither that the _best_ nor the _better_ survive, but the fittest--or if Mr. Wells prefers, for it matters not one whit--the fitter. This lack of a fine appreciation of words is not, unfortunately, peculiar to Mr. Wells. There is no word in the language that more exactly expresses the fact than the word fittest: as Darwin recognised when he promptly incorporated Spencer's phrase in the second edition of the _Origin of Species_ as the best interpretation of his own phrase “natural selection”![9] Fitness is the capacity to fit: a thing that is fit is a thing that _fits_. A living creature survives in proportion as it fits its environment--the physical environment in the case of vegetables and the lower animals, the physical, social, intellectual and moral environment in the case of man. The kind of glove that most perfectly fits the hand is the fittest glove and will survive in the struggle for existence between gloves. If, instead of a glove, we take a living creature, say a microbe, the kind of microbe that best fits into the environment provided by, say, human blood, is the fittest and will survive and be the cause of our commonest disease. Thus the tubercle bacillus is at once the _fittest_ microbe and, not the best, but the worst. Among ourselves, the newspaper devoted to yesterday's murder is the fittest and survives, ousting the newspaper which reckons with the crucifixion, or the murder of Socrates or Bruno. In a society of blackguardism, the biggest blackguard is the fittest man and will survive: he is also the worst. In another society the best man is the fittest and survives. The capacity to fit into the environment is the capacity that determines survival: it has no moral connotation whatever. If Herbert Spencer had written the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells desires, he would have written palpable nonsense: as it was he used the fittest word--in this case also the best, because the truest. Referring to the queen-bee, who destroys her own daughters, Darwin says, “undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.”

If natural selection were the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells would have us believe, there would be nothing for eugenics or race-culture to do: and heaven would long ago have come to earth. If in all ages the better men and women had survived and become parents, earth would long ago have become a demi-paradise indeed, there would have been no arrests, no reversals in the history of human progress, and life would be already what, some day, it will be, when there is achieved the eugenic ideal--which is precisely that the best or better members of our race shall be the selected for the supreme profession of parenthood. In other words, the eugenic ideal, the ideal of race-culture, is _to ensure that the fittest shall be the best_. Always, everywhere, without a solitary exception, human, animal or vegetable, the fittest have ultimately survived and must survive. Once realise what is the meaning of the word fit--best seen in the verb “to fit”--and we shall see that, as Herbert Spencer pointed out in his overwhelming reply to the late Lord Salisbury's attack on evolution, the idea of the survival of the fittest is a necessity of thought.[10]

But, alas, the idea of the survival of the best or the better is not a necessity of thought! The fittest microbes are the worst from our point of view, because they are most inimical to the highest forms of life; the fittest newspaper may be the worst, because it panders to the worst but most widespread and irresponsible elements in human nature; everything and every one that succeeds, succeeds because it or he fits the conditions: but to succeed is not necessarily to be good. Indeed everything that exists at all, living or lifeless, an atom or an animal, a molecule or a moon, exists because it can exist, because it fits the conditions of existence: there is no moral question involved, but only a mechanical one. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to make an environment, conditions of law and public opinion, _such that the fittest shall be the best and the best the fittest therein_.

If memory may be trusted, the primary meaning of the word _fit_ has not hitherto been called in by any one to elucidate the meaning of Spencer's phrase: perhaps it may be hoped that we shall at last begin to understand it, if we remember that a thing is fit because it fits. It is best not to be too sanguine, however, and therefore we may attempt to illustrate the case from another aspect.

=Survival-value.=--Every living thing and nearly every character or feature of a living thing that survives, survives because it has value or capacity for life--which may be called, in Professor Lloyd Morgan's phrase, _survival-value_. The character that gives an organism survival-value, or value for life, the character that enables it to fit its environment, may be of any order. The atom, as I have said elsewhere, is an organism writ small. The kinds of atoms that have survived in the age-long struggle for existence between atoms are those that have survival-value on account of their internal stability: as Empedocles argued ages ago. In the case of living things, which individually die, it is evident that the capacity to reproduce themselves is one of supreme survival-value. If mankind lost this capacity, all its other characters of survival-value, such as intelligence, would obviously avail it nought. Certain valuable members of society may fall short in this cardinal respect, and therefore become extinct. Indeed, other forms of survival-value, as we shall see, seem to be in large measure inimical to fertility: and this is perhaps the chief obstacle to eugenics.[11]

Fertility apart, the character having survival-value may take a thousand forms. In the case of the parasitic microbe it is an evil character, the power to produce toxins or poisons. In the case of the tiger it is the possession of large and powerful bones and claws and muscles and teeth. In the case of the ox it is a complicated and efficient digestive apparatus, enabling it to fit into a food-environment which is too innutritious to sustain the life of creatures not so endowed. Nature seeks only the fittest; not the best but the best-adapted; she asks no moral questions. A Keats, a Spinoza, or a Schubert must go under if his factors of survival-value do not enable him to resist those of the tubercle bacillus, its toxins or poisons. She welcomes the parasitic tapeworm, all hooks and mouth or stomach, because these give it survival-value; and so on.

The business of eugenics or race-culture, then, is to create an environment such that those characters which we desire as moral and intelligent beings shall be endowed with the highest possible survival-value, as against those which ally so many men with the microbe and the tapeworm. There are those who live in society to-day, and reproduce their like, in virtue of the poisons they produce, in virtue of their tenacious hooks and voracious stomachs. If society be organised so that these are factors of more survival-value than the disinterested search for truth, or mother-love, or the power to create great poetry or music--then, according to the inevitable and universal law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust our poets and our poisoners our philosophers. These things have happened and may happen again at any time. It does not matter that the good thing, in virtue of survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature never gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but only and always in favour of the fit. Let the conditions change, so that rapacity fits them better than righteousness, or--as in a completely “collectivist” state--vegetableness rather than virility, and the thing we call high will go under before the thing we call low. Nature recognises neither high nor low but only fitness or value for life in the conditions that actually obtain. These laws enthroned and dethroned the civilisations of the past: they have enthroned and may dethrone us. But this end is not inevitable, since man--and this is his great character--not merely reacts to his environment, as all creatures must, but can create and recreate it. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to create an environment such that the human characters of which the human spirit approves shall in it outweigh those of which we disapprove. Make it fittest to be best and the best will win--not because it is the best, but because it is the fittest: had the worst been the fittest it would have won. In society to-day both forms of the process may be observed. The balance between them determines its destiny. It is the business of eugenics to throw the whole weight of human purpose into the scale of the good.

=Evolution not necessarily progress.=--No excessive space has been devoted to this distinction between the fittest and the best and to the real meaning of Spencer's famous phrase, if perchance it should avail in any degree to dispel one of the commonest of the many common delusions regarding the nature of organic evolution and its outcome. This delusion is that progress is an inevitable law of nature.[12] The great process of history, as revealed by biology, displays as its supreme fact the occurrence of progress. The principles of evolution teach that this progress--as, for instance, in the evolution of man--is a product of the survival of the fittest; whilst we are also reminded that the survival of the fittest is a necessary truth: but it does not follow that progress is inevitable.

In the first place, natural selection involves selection. Where all the young members of a new generation of any species survive, and parenthood becomes not a privilege but a common and universal function, plainly the process is in abeyance: and, in the second place, since the survival of the fittest is not the survival of the best, but only the survival of the best adapted, the process may at any time take the form of retrogression rather than that of progress. The assumption that, because progress has been effected through natural selection, we need do no more than fold our hands, or unfold them merely to applaud, involves the denial of one of the most familiar facts of natural history--the fact of racial degeneration. The parasitic microbes, the parasitic worms, the barnacles, innumerable living creatures both animal and vegetable, individuals and races of mankind, to-day as in all ages--these prove only too clearly that the process of the survival of the fittest may make as definitely for retrogression in one case as for progress in another.

By all means let us infer from the facts of organic evolution the conclusion that further progress must surely be possible, so much progress having already been achieved as is represented by the difference between inorganic matter or the amœba or microbe on the one hand, and man on the other hand. But let us most earnestly beware of the false and disastrous optimism which should suppose that because the survival of the fittest has often, and indeed most often, meant the survival of the best, it means always that and nothing else. On the contrary, we must learn that, even in natural circumstances, apart from any interference by man, the survival of the fittest often means racial degeneration--a tapeworm kept in spirits should stand upon the study mantelpiece of all who think with Mr. Wells that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the better; and still more notably we must learn that the interference of man in the case of his own species, sometimes of evil intent, sometimes for the highest ends, with the process of natural selection, has repeatedly led, and is now in large part leading, to nothing other than that process of racial degeneration of which the tapeworm and the barnacle should be our perpetual reminders. The case becomes serious enough when man interferes with the process of selection merely with the effect of suspending it, wholly or in part: but it becomes far more serious when his interference constitutes a reversal of the process. This most supremely disastrous of all conceivable consequences of man's intelligence and moral sense is known as reversed selection, and must be carefully studied hereafter. Meanwhile, we must devote some space to a most important consideration--namely, that though Nature is impartial in her choice, and will, for instance, allow the poisons of a microbe such as the tubercle bacillus to destroy the life of a Spinoza or a Keats or a Schubert, yet, on the whole, the survival-value of the mental, spiritual, or psychical in all its forms does persistently tend to outweigh that of the physical or material--of this great truth the evolution and dominance of man himself being the supreme example.

The very fact of progress, which I would define as the emergence and increasing dominance of mind, demonstrates--it being remembered that natural selection has no moral prejudices--that even in a world of claws and toxins the psychical must have possessed sufficient survival-value to survive. It is quite evident that even the lowliest psychical characters, such as sharpness of sensation, discrimination, and memory, must be of value in the struggle for life. More and more we might expect to find, and do actually find in the course of evolution, that creatures live by their wits, rather than by force of bone or muscle. The psychical was certainly given no unfair start--on the contrary. It has had to struggle for its emergence; it has emerged only where there has been struggle and has done so because it could--because of its superior survival-value. It has the right which belongs to might--in the world of life there is no other.[13]

By no means less evident is the inherently superior survival-value of the psychical, if we turn from its aspects of sensation and intelligence to those which are all summed up under the word love. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's mad misconception of the Darwinian theory, no one who has studied the facts of reproduction and its conditions in the world of life can question the incalculable survival-value of love in animal history. The success of those most ancient of all societies, of which the ant-heap and the bee-hive are the types, depends absolutely upon the self-sacrifice of the individual. If we pass upwards from the insects to the lowest vertebrates, we find the survival-value of love proved by the comparison between various species of fish, and its increasing importance may be traced upwards through amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals in succession, up to man. Natural selection thus actually selects morality. Without love no baby could live for twenty-four hours. Every human being that exists or ever has existed or ever will exist is a product of mother-love or foster-mother-love, and I am well entitled to say, as I have so often said, _no morals, no man_. The creature in whom organic morality is at its height has become the lord of the earth in virtue of that morality which natural selection has selected, not from any moral bias, but because of its superior survival-value.