90 Human and Natural Selection. 



son with the purposive selection of man, involves 

 the conception of nature as an intelligent, active 

 being. Nature seems to do so much, it is urged, 

 only because you have personified her ; use un- 

 metaphorical language, and you will not make it 

 credible that blind natural processes can ever at 

 tain the ends realized by human design. But 

 tliis dogmatism cannot be established. For it 

 is certainly conceivable that that selective breed 

 ing by which man works all his results might be 

 brought about without the intervention of man. 

 All that is required is that organic beings which 

 have undergone some modification shall be al 

 lowed to propagate it, say, to breed together ; and 

 this would result as inevitably from the extermi 

 nation of all competing forms as from the exclu 

 sion of them practised by man. But extermina 

 tion does take place when variations occur in any 

 individual which give it an advantage over its 

 rivals in the struggle for life ; and since varia 

 tions useful to man do actually occur in organic 

 beings, it would be a most extraordinary fact if 

 none occurred useful to the beings themselves, 

 especially when we consider the vast possibili 

 ties for such useful variations contained in the in 

 finitely complex relations of all organic beings to 

 one another and to their environment. Assum- 



