450 Living in a World of Change 



people in bargaining for wage or for prices. On the other 

 hand, the rebelHous spirits of the submerged portions of the 

 population found also a justification in " science " for the 

 doctrine that all is fair in war. In addition to citing scrip- 

 ture as needed, debaters were enabled to cite science. 



" The struggle for existence " and natural selection 

 serve to support both the teachings of extreme militarists and 

 extreme pacifists, to take a single striking illustration. The 

 philosophy of struggle as the means by which the superman 

 is to arrive becomes a justification, in the name of science 

 of the most ruthless and brutal attitudes. On the other 

 hand, the fact that in war the soundest and the bravest in- 

 dividuals are the first to be slaughtered is used to point the 

 deteriorating effects of war upon the human race: it is only 

 the relatively unfit who are left by war to perpetuate the 

 race and there must therefore be progressive degeneration 

 in proportion as we resort to war to settle our international 

 differences. We have seen that similar arguments were used 

 by Haeckel and Virchow, not on the common assumption 

 of the Darwinian formula, but for and against Darwinism 

 respectively, on the common assumption that the menace 

 of Socialism must be suppressed. 



It would be interesting to inquire how far Karl Marx's 

 theory of the class struggle was formulated under the in- 

 fluence of the same circumstances. At any rate, the com- 

 mon thought of the middle of the century took readily to 

 the idea of competitive struggle as the normal course of 

 nature and of life. It was futile subsequently for Darwin 

 or for any of his defenders to insist that the struggle for 

 existence was not intended to picture nature as " red in tooth 

 and claw " or to sanction the atrocities in human competitions 

 as according with tlie laws of nature. 



Mutual Aid 



The implied cruelty of nature, which the doctrine of 

 natural selection emphasized, made the Darwinian teaching 



