THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE. 203 



penetrate into their inner meaning. Men forget when 

 they denounce the Struggle for Life, that it is to be 

 judged not only on the ground of sentiment but of 

 reason, that not its local or surface effects only, but 

 its permanent influence on the order of the world, 

 must be taken into account, 



Even on the lower ranges of Nature the unfavorable 

 implications of the Struggle for Life have probably 

 been exaggerated. While it is essential to an under 

 standing of the course of evolution, to retain in the 

 imagination a vivid sense of the Struggle itself, we 

 must beware of over-coloring the representation, or 

 flooding it with accompaniments of emotion borrowed 

 from our own sensations. The word Struggle at all 

 in this connection is little more than a metaphor. 

 When it is said that an animal struggles, all that is 

 really meant is that it lives. An animal, that is to 

 say, does not, in addition to all its other activities, 

 have to employ a vast number of special activities, to 

 the exercise of which the term Struggle is to be 

 applied. It is Life itself which is the Struggle: and 

 the whole Life, and the whole of the activities and 

 powers which make up life are involved in it. To 

 speak of Struggle in the sense of some special and 

 separate struggle, to conceive of battle, or even a 

 series of battles, is misleading, where all is struggle 

 and where all is battle. Especially must we beware 

 of reading into it our personal ideas with regard to 

 accompaniments of pain. The probabilities are that 

 the Struggle for Life in the lower creation is, to say 

 the least, less painful than it looks. Whether we 

 regard the dulness of the states of consciousness 

 among lower animals, or the fact that the condition 



