250 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



with the first mandate — '^preserve thy self ^^ — are not 

 purely selfish, although their immediate value is realized 

 as individual benefit. Surely an organism that failed 

 to live an efficient individual hfe would be ineffective 

 in reproduction, so that from one point of view every- 

 thing an animal does is tributary to the culminating 

 act performed for the larger good of the hfe of the whole 

 species. It is a nice balance that nature has worked 

 out in Amoeba, as well as in all other cases, between the 

 personal life of the individual, complete only when the 

 final process of multiplication supervenes, and this 

 process itself, which demands an efficient performance, 

 even though this is destructive of the performer. 



Before passing to the next members of the series, which 

 reveal additional principles more truly social in the 

 human sense, let us pause to note that already we have 

 found certain natural criteria that belong in the depart- 

 ment of ethics. Even in the case of the biological unit 

 like Amceba, which is entirely solitary and unrelated to 

 other individuals of its kind excepting in so far as it is 

 a link in the chain of successive generations, any vital 

 activity can be called good or bad, right or wrong. 

 Nature judges an act good and right if it tends to pre- 

 serve the animal and the species ; an act is wrong and 

 evil if it is biologically destructive of the animal or if it 

 interferes with the perpetuation of its kind. Again 

 it must be pointed out that these terms are human words, 

 employed for the complex conceptions that belong alone 

 to retrospective and contemplative human conscious- 

 ness; to most of us they seem to imply the existence 

 of some absolute standard or ideal by which a given 

 act may be tested to see if it is right or the opposite. 



