5 o NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



The notion cannot, for a moment, be entertained 

 that Nature leaves to chance the numbers of the 

 young that fall to be destroyed, and that fall to be 

 saved. Into Nature's arrangements for the effecting 

 of any of her purposes, the element of chance can 

 never enter. She works by laws in whose operation 

 the means are finely adjusted to the ends contemplated. 

 In human affairs, events which seem to fall entirely 

 within the domain of chance, and to be subject to no 

 rule whatever, are found, when they are gathered 

 together and shown in their totalities, to be subject to 

 a governing principle which determines their incidence, 

 and brings about a fixed and invariable general result. 

 To give a trite example. When we look to the 

 individual action, nothing seems more the effect of 

 chance or fortune's caprice than whether or not a 

 letter deposited in the post-office will be found to be 

 unaddressed ; yet over the United Kingdom the 

 number of such letters is found not to vary propor- 

 tionally to population from year to year. 



Thus we see that even the caprices and vagaries of 

 the mind, that seem as if they could not, by any 

 possibility, have a governing principle of incidence, 

 are proved to fall within the domain of unvarying law. 

 Doubtless if there existed an intelligence compre- 

 hensive enough to know all the springs of action of 

 the mind, and all the ways in which it is affected by 

 its immediate environment, and also the actual position 

 and environment of each mind, it would be able to 

 foretell with mathematical certainty the amount and 



