268 WHAT IS LIFE? 



true university is the world, and true education is 

 the study of Nature and learning to obey, and profit 

 by, the laws of Nature. 



No doubt in any arrangement there must be grades 

 in society, there must be a lower order, and an upper 

 order. If such were not the case we should be reduced 

 to a hopeless state of passive mediocrity. Emulation 

 would cease. Competition, so long as it is within the 

 lines of emulation, is healthy, and tends to produce 

 happiness. But this is quite different from the con- 

 dition of things, which exists at the present moment, 

 when the efforts of men are all tending by honest and 

 dishonest means to crush out that individual who seeks 

 to live by honest industry. It is a civil warfare more 

 terrible than actual warfare because it lingers so long. 

 Day by day, through the conditions which must neces- 

 sarily result from over-population and an increasing 

 over-production, failures miserable failures in life 

 must go on increasing, and men are forced, in order 

 to live, to become more dishonest. Hence society is 

 getting divided into two classes : the few, that is 

 those who have the power of concentration, especially 

 by division of labour, and often by intrigue, decep- 

 tion, and the grossest of dishonesty but often legal 

 dishonesty become exorbitantly rich, and the in- 



Lancelet, later of a Fish, and in subsequent stages those of Amphibian 

 and Mammal forms ; and that in the further evolution of these 

 mammal forms those first appear which stand lowest in the series, 

 namely, forms allied to the Beaked Animals ; . . . then those allied 

 to Pouched Animals, . . . which are followed by forms most 

 resembling Apes ; till at last the peculiar human form is produced 

 as the final result," ("The Evolution of Man," Professor Ernst 

 Hasckel, 1883, vol. i. p. 2.) 



