EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



nously alive to-day, having marked time these fifty 

 million years. The existence of such forms has 

 indeed, crassly enough, been urged as an argument 

 against the theory of organic evolution, proving, 

 however, only that the antagonist did not under 

 stand the theory. Spencer s copiously misinter 

 preted phrase is &quot;survival of the fittest,&quot; not 

 &quot;survival of the best.&quot; In certain conditions, 

 such as lack of sunlight, the fittest organism may 

 not be the best. The best needs better condi 

 tions and dies out ; the worse, being the fitter, sur 

 vives. What is true of the fungus is true of man. 

 The conditions may be such that mercy, justice, 

 and genius cannot survive under them, while bru 

 tality, fraud, and convention can; then again the 

 worse, being fitter, survives. This might apply 

 to newspapers, to men under a military regime, to 

 books, to what you please. It is invariably the 

 fittest that survive; but the fittest may be the 

 worst. Progress, then, is not inevitable, and the 

 proof is furnished both by universal experience 

 and by scientific generalizations. 



Huxley s famous Romanes lecture, &quot;Evolution 

 and Ethics,&quot; furnishes me with a quotation which 

 is to the point: 



&quot;There is another fallacy which appears to me to 

 pervade the so-called ethics of evolution. It is the 

 notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants 

 have advanced in perfection of organization by means 

 of the struggle for existence and the consequent sur 

 vival of the fittest, therefore men in society, men as 



282 



