14 HOLISM AND EVOLUTION chap. 



developments of what we are pleased to call the lower 

 creatures. If secondary sexual characters with all their 

 perfection of form and colour did originate and develop 

 under the stimulus of Sexual Selection, we shall have to 

 revise our views radically as to the psychical sensitiveness 

 and endowments of large classes of these lower animals. 

 If, for instance, the human female showed the same sensitive 

 judgment and discrimination as the female bird or insect 

 shows a sensitive sex instinct, what supermen we sorry males 

 in time would become! I am afraid, however, that the 

 theory of Sexual Selection does not tell the whole story, 

 and that there is more in the sexual situation than appears 

 from that theory. I shall refer to the subject again 

 in Chapter VIII. But for my present purpose it is 

 only necessary to emphasise that this form of selection is 

 not mechanical but psychical. If Sexual Selection plays 

 the great part in organic Evolution which Darwin, Weis- 

 mann and many other great biologists assign to it, we can 

 only conclude that to that extent at any rate the motive force 

 \ in Evolution is psychical and not mechanical. 



I would go further and, in opposition to current views, 

 I would contend that even Natural Selection, in so far as it 

 is a struggle among animal and plant forms and not merely 

 the pressure or agelong effect of the inorganic environment, 

 is fundamentally psychical. The advance takes place gen- 

 erally because the more fit organism deliberately for 

 its own purposes destroys the less fit organism. In its 

 essence the organic struggle creates a psychical situation just 

 as much as war among humans is a psychical situation. 

 And it is only because we abstract from the situation its 

 real character of animal struggle and view the total statistical 

 effect of innumerable situations as itself a sort of personified 

 operative force in the form of Natural Selection, that the 

 appearance of a mechanical external factor is created, 

 operating on Evolution from the outside and determining 

 its course mechanically. Looked at as a whole, and at a 

 distance in which all concrete cases are blurred in the general 

 view, the struggle for existence among animals and plants 



