260 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



will hold up the life of the city for a time, and cows 

 walking along railways are treated as obstacles by 

 trains proceeding in the same direction. So it comes 

 about that much that was once progressive in organic 

 evolution has become an obstacle or a drag to psy- 

 chozoic evolution; it is relatively retrogressive, and, 

 from our present standpoint, bad. To take the sim- 

 plest and most fundamental example: evolution by 

 blind natural selection was the method of progress for 

 organisms below man. Unceasing struggle and cour- 

 age was the chief factor in producing the grandeur 

 and strength of the lion, the swiftness and grace of 

 deer, the brilliance and lightness of the birds. But 

 if the same end can be obtained both more quickly 

 and more bloodlessly by new methods, then the old 

 stands condemned. Here lies the key to the problem 

 propounded by Huxley in his Romanes Lecture — the 

 problem of man's relation to the rest of the cosmic 

 process, at once sprung from it by gradual genera- 

 tion and separated from it by an absolute and un- 

 bridgeable chasm, at once one with it and in deadly 

 combat with it and all its ways. 



Our mode of envisaging the problem illuminates 

 it, and shows it as inevitable and intelligible instead 

 of insoluble and tormenting; and illuminates too 

 many other minor problems of good and evil. But 

 all this is a side-issue: revenons a nos moutons. 



Unknown, or neutral, or hostile power: a move- 

 ment similar in direction to the direction in which 

 history on the whole shows we are moving, and to 



