20 ETHICAL ASPECTS OF EVOLUTION 



is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world the 

 slightest variations ; rejecting those that are bad, and adding 

 up all that are good ; silently and insensibly working, 

 wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improve 

 ment of each living being in relation to the organic and 

 inorganic conditions of life (p. 95, 4th ed.). Natural selection 

 can act on each part of each being solely through and for its 

 advantage (id. p. 177) ; and as natural selection works 

 solely by and for the good of each being, all corporal and 

 mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection 

 (id. p. 577). 



These may be supplemented by a passage from Dr. F. C. 

 Schiller s essay in Personal Idealism, p. 58 : 



The conception of natural selection was suggested by 

 human selection. Its procedure by trying is so far analogous 

 to that of our own intelligence, and it is denied to be that 

 of an intelligence only because of a misunderstanding of 

 the methodological character of the postulate of indefinite 

 variation. We may, therefore, plausibly contend that if 

 a superhuman intelligence is active in the formation of the 

 Cosmos, its methods and its nature are the same as ours ; it 

 also proceeds by experiment, and adapts means to ends, 

 and learns from experience. 



The essential nature of this process, as conceived by 

 Mr. H. Spencer, 1 is that it everywhere produces greater 

 fitness to the conditions of existence, be they what they 

 may. Applying alike to the lowest and highest forms of 

 organization, there is in all cases a progressive adaptation, 

 and a survival of the most adapted. This progressive 

 adaptation consists in a multiplication of the points of 

 contact between the organism and its environment, each 

 new point being one of correspondence. Not only do no 

 new points of conflict arise, but points of conflict already 

 in existence are gradually eliminated by the disappearance, 

 in the competition for survival, of those races in which they 

 occur. The end to which the process is directed is a perfect 

 life, constituted by a perfect correspondence of the organism 

 with its environment. At that ultimate end of evolution 



1 H. Spencer, Biology, i. 354. 



