220 DARWINIANISM. 



and to Wellington as to every other warrior that ever 

 fought. 



Physical necessity and physical contingency, at once 

 law and lawlessness nay lawlessness from law ; for the 

 streams, lines, are law, while the crossings, the touchings 

 together (contingencies), are lawlessness. That is the 

 fate, the doom of externality as externality. With an in 

 and in of internality as internality, there may be the 

 necessity of reason ; but with an out and out boundlessly 

 difference out and out boundlessly, of externality as 

 externality, se^-externality, externality to self, there must 

 be the necessity of unreason. There is still, doubtless, 

 the externality of law physical force gives that So to 

 speak, there is the face of law, but contingency is ever at 

 work marring it. Were not contingency as a stage for 

 free-will, how could free-will be ? 



In the first half of this century there were the best 

 the best that have ever been almost in all things 

 in war and politics, in poetry, criticism, fiction, philo- 

 sophy, but now ? We are " a feeble and a puny folk." 

 Hemisphere east or hemisphere west, the latter half of 

 the nineteenth century will be known, it may be, with all 

 its exceptions, as probably the feeblest half century in 

 the whole of history. 



It is fitting that at such a time the brocard that rules 

 should be the Survival of the Fittest ; for it is not easy 

 to imagine a more meaningless scroll to march under. 

 The proposition, as we have seen in fact, is wholly false 

 as it stands. That is, it is not a truth, or a certainty, 

 or a necessity that the Fittest survives, or should survive, 

 unless the proposition be true when converted simpliciter 

 thus : Who survives is fittest. If that be a just definition 

 in the case, then the terms are exactly equivalent and may 

 lie converted simpliciter. But is that an apodictic proposi- 

 tion, That a survivor, just by surviving, demonstrates 



