8 ECONOMICS 



point no subtle controversy over Epicureanism, or of Hedonism, or of 

 Benthamite utilitarianism. " Good " is here any objective condi- 

 tion, thing, or act, which is seen to have a beneficial relation to the 

 man himself, or indirectly to any one, or anything, else to whom he is 

 bound by sympathy. The old discussion of the utilitarian philosophy 

 of morals has almost lost its meaning to modern thought. In the 

 light of the evolutionary theory it may now be said that a conception 

 of good and evil, in a physiological, an economic, a political, a moral, 

 and a religious sense, are rooted alike in this primordial fact of the 

 reaction of animate creatures upon their environment, choosing that 

 which makes for efficiency and life, and avoiding that which destroys 

 the individual and the species. When man at last rises to the stage 

 of conscious and purposeful mastery over the world, when he, at last, 

 in his gropings for a philosophy of things, begins to create also an 

 economic theory, he recognizes in the broad conception of 'the 

 good" the principle that has ruled the destiny of evolving life 

 throughout its struggles upward from the ocean slime to the highest 

 human intelligence. 



Scarcity. Next to the conception of the good the most funda- 

 mental economic conception is scarcity; indeed it may be said that 

 economy (which is the study of the good in the objective world) does 

 not truly begin until scarcity sets in. Among the many things 

 surrounding the wriggling bit of protoplasm are some comparatively 

 few things better adapted than others to further its life. It is the 

 appropriation of these better things that insures survival, and so 

 nature begins to shape the various species, making them larger, 

 stronger, swifter to get, more able to digest and assimilate. But 

 improvement in one individual and one species is met by improve- 

 ment in another, and the contest never relaxes. The origin of 

 species, once so mysterious, has, by the revelations of biology, been 

 made a familiar fact. Selection of the fittest is an agency of biologic . 

 progress because of the universal prevalence of superfluous life 

 germs, competing for a limited supply of scarce means of life. This 

 profound truth came to Darwin while he was reading Malthus' 

 Principle of Population. Malthus had got a partial and distorted 

 glimpse of a great fact of nature: the scarcity of food and the excess 

 of life germs. It may be questioned whether Darwin and his fol- 

 lowers in turn have sufficiently recognized that natural selection is 

 but a fragmentary expression of a greater economic principle, the 

 scarcity of goods compared with wants. The survival and increase 

 of a species is but the ultimate resultant of a multitude of acts and 

 relations determining which of the individuals shall wax strong and 

 prevail in the struggle for the scarce goods of their environment. 



The process of adaptation is twofold, individual and racial, 

 a contrast implied in the whole question of natural and acquired 



