252 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



more lunatic asylums more doctors more taxes, 

 more oppression more misery. The efforts of the 

 medical world are all put forth to ameliorate the 

 condition. But science tells us that we live in a 

 complex condition of things, where the germs of all 

 diseases surround us, 1 that we breathe them hourly, 



would the struggle for life among the better portion of mankind be 

 made easier, but also an advantageous artificial process of selection 

 would be set in practice, since the possibility of transmitting their 

 injurious qualities by inheritance would be taken from those degenerate 

 outcasts." 



" Against the injurious influence of the various kinds of artificial 

 selection, we fortunately have a salutary counterpoise, in the invincible 

 and much more powerful influence of natural selection, which prevails 

 everywhere. For in the life of man, as well as in that of animals 

 and plants, this influence is the most important transforming 

 principle, and the strongest lever for progress and amelioration. 

 The result of the struggle for life is that, in the long run, that which 

 is better, because more perfect, conquers that which is weaker and 

 imperfect. In human life, however, this struggle for life will ever 

 become more and more of an .intellectual struggle, not a struggle with 

 weapons of murder. The organ which, above all others, in man 

 becomes more perfect by the ennobling influence of natural selection, 

 is the brain. The man w4th the most perfect understanding, not the 

 man with the best revolver, will in the long run be victorious ; he 

 will transmit to his descendants the qualities of the brain which 

 assisted him in the victory. Thus then we may justly hope, in spite 

 of all the efforts of retrograde forces, that the progress of mankind 

 towards freedom, and thus to the utmost perfection, will, by the 

 happy influence of natural selection, become more and more a 

 certainty." (" The History of Creation," Prof . Ernst Haeckel, 1892, 

 vol. i. pp. 175-179.) 



1 " Without doubt, the germs which are the authors of these 

 diseases are everywhere scattered around, but attenuated ; and in 

 this state a man may carry them about him or in his intestinal canal 

 without great damage. They only become dangerous when, by con- 

 ditions of overcrowding, and perhaps of successive developments on 

 the surfaces of wounds, in bodies enfeebled by disease, their virulence 



