1 68 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART m 



offspring to produce. Why has it not taught me 

 exactly how much sympathy I am to feel ? Why has 

 it developed a force uncertain in amount and working ? 

 Unless because, after all, spirit is different from nature ; 

 because it is inconceivable that natural selection, and natu- 

 ral selection alone, has " out of darkness " stretched forth 

 " the hands that reach through nature, moulding men." 



Again, let us note that two qualities have been 

 selected two seemingly if not really opposite qualities 

 egoism and altruism. 1 How may this be ? Nature 

 has really been selecting men, not qualities, men (or 

 societies of men) who are the sum of all their qualities. 

 Nature is regarded as a hanging judge. Every crime 

 in her calendar is a capital offence. If nature is not 

 satisfied with you, " Off with his head," she cries ; and 

 forthwith you are thrust out. Nature has not been 

 selecting one quality at a time ; she has been selecting 

 aggregate fitness. It is lawful to study the process one 

 quality at a time, if you like. But you must keep in 

 mind that that is your own " abstraction." The only 

 question with nature has been, first and last, who is in 

 the aggregate fittest to survive ? Fitness has been 

 selected, not quality A tending to fitness, nor quality B 

 tending to fitness, but A + B + . . . M. And again, 

 from this rather different point of view, we are struck 

 with the anomalousness of the fact that natural selec- 

 tion, if it has really been at work, has not already 

 produced an automatic balance between egoism and 

 altruism, or has not done so in the past if it is going to 

 do so in the future. 



There might indeed be an explanation, if sym- 

 pathy in its wider range outside the family were only 

 (what Mr. Sutherland holds it was primarily) a by- 



1 Mr. Sutherland thinks the latter word stilted, and avoids it. 



