EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS. 499 



" from the laws of life it must be concluded that unceasing social 

 discipline will so mould human nature, that eventually sympathetic 

 pleasures will be spontaneously pursued to the fullest extent advan- 

 tageous to each and all." — Ethics, §95. 



" With the highest type of human life, there will come also a 

 state in which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one 

 merges in the other." — lb., appended chapter to Part I. 



Everywhere it is asserted that the process of adaptation (which, 

 in its direct and indirect forms, is a part of the cosmic process) must 

 continuously tend (under peaceful conditions) to produce a type of 

 society and a type of individual in which " the instincts of savagery 

 in civilized men " will be not only " curbed," but repressed. And I 

 believe that in few, if any, writings will be found as unceasing a 

 denunciation of that brute form of the struggle for existence which 

 has been going on between societies, and which, though in early 

 times a cause of progress, is now becoming a cause of retrogression. 

 No one has so often insisted that " the ethical process " is hindered 

 by the cowardly conquests of bullet and shell over arrow and assegai, 

 which demoralize the one side while slaughtering the other. 



And here, while referring to the rebarbarizing effects of the 

 struggle for existence carried on by brute force, let me say that I 

 am glad to have Prof. Huxley's endorsement of the proposition that 

 the survival of the fittest is not always the survival of the best. 

 Twenty years ago, in an essay entitled " Mr. Martineau on Evolu- 

 tion," I pointed out that " the fittest " throughout a wide range of 

 cases — perhaps the widest range — are not the " best " ; and said that 

 I had chosen the expression " survival of the fittest " rather than 

 survival of the best because the latter phrase did not cover the facts. 



Chiefly, however, I wish to point out the radical misconceptions 

 which are current concerning that form of evolutionary ethics with 

 which I am identified. In the preface to The Data of Ethics, 

 when first published separately, I remarked that by treating the 

 whole subject in parts, which would by many be read as though they 

 were wholes, I had " given abundant opportunity for misrepresenta- 

 tion." The opportunity has not been lost. The division treating 

 of " Justice " has been habitually spoken of as though nothing more 

 was intended to be said; and this notwithstanding warnings which 

 the division itself contains, as in § 257, and again in § 270; where it 

 is said that " other injunctions which ethics has to utter do not here 

 concern us . . . there are the demands and restraints included un- 

 der Negative Beneficence and Positive Beneficence, to be hereafter 



