206 THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. 



torious struggle ; it has succeeded in its stupendous 

 task ; and there is nothing of order or beauty or per- 

 fection in living Nature that does not owe something 

 to its having been carried on. The first duty of those 

 who demur to the cost of progress is to make sure 

 that they comprehend in all its richness the infinity of 

 the gift this sacrifice has purchased for humanity. 

 The end of the Struggle for Life is not battle ; it is 

 not even victory, it is evolution. The result is not 

 wounds, it is health. Nature is a vast and com- 

 plicated system of devices to keep things changing, 

 adjusting, and, as it seems, progressing. The 

 Struggle for Life is a species of necessitated aspira- 

 tion, the vis a tergo which keeps living things in 

 motion. It does not follow, of course, that that 

 motion should be upward; that is dependent on other 

 considerations. But the point to mark is that without 

 the struggle for food and the pressure of want, with- 

 out the conflict with foes and the challenge of climate, 

 the world would be left to stagnation. Change, 

 adventure, temptation, vicissitude even to the verge 

 of calamity, these are the life of the world. 



There is another side to this principle from which 

 its higher significance becomes still more apparent. 

 It follows from the Struggle for Life that those ani- 

 mals which struggle most successfully will prosper, 

 while the less successful will disappear -hence the 

 well-known principle of Natural Selection or the Sur- 

 vival of the Fittest. Waiving the discussion of this 

 law in general, and the varying meanings which " fit- 

 ness" assumes as we rise in the scale of being, observe 

 the role it plays in Nature. The object of the Sur- 

 vival of the Fittest is to produce fitness. And it does 



