200 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



beneath them ; but they, with whatever limitations 

 and exceptions, are victors, and champions of the 

 world. Concurrently, they have learned again, with 

 certain limitations and exceptions not to struggle 

 CL outrance against each other. There follows from 

 these two attainments (once again, with some strange 

 and saddening exceptions among the lower human 

 races) that man has the awful prerogative and solemn 

 privilege of dying a natural death. Such a thing is 

 rare in the animal world; but men drink their cup 

 of pain to the last drop, and pass, it may be, with 

 unbandaged eyes behind the veil, into the unseen. 



Famine. Emergence from struggle with animal 

 competitors may signify nothing better than a liberty 

 to die of famine. Natural selection does not govern 

 the physiological development of men, for they have 

 not overfilled the world ; but a local and temporary 

 over -population not infrequently arises, and famine 

 follows close upon it. Civilisation ought to have other 

 means of coping with such an overplus ; nature treats 

 it as a normal case of animal superabundance, and 

 falls to selecting again by the old eliminating methods. 

 The human harvest is weeded; the strongest survive, 

 weakened probably not permanently injured ; others 

 succumb. Here then is natural selection at work 

 among men, and conceivably Natural Selection A, if 

 Natural Selection A anywhere exists. Of course it 

 will be much hampered, more hampered than among 

 any of the animals, by the comparatively low rate of 

 fecundity in man, though famine goes a certain way 

 towards remedying that. Among the higher animals, 

 as we saw, evolution has continued no less markedly 

 than with the' lowest, and we decided that some other 

 factor making for progress must be in operation there 



