SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY 395 



Rousseau and his like. It is a kind of bias that we may pre- 

 sume the predaceous types in Nature to feel towards the cross- 

 feeders. Rousseau, as we have seen, favours cross-feeding. 



"We must give credit to Darwin's "bull-dog" for at least 

 feeling some qualms of conscience anent his treatment of 

 "poor" Rousseau. The world, however, owes infinitely more 

 to cross-feeders than to the tiger class, and in justice it must 

 be conceded it owes much more to Rousseau than to Huxley. 



It is now evident also that by reducing the concept of 

 evolution to the truism that whatever has survived 

 was the fittest to survive, Huxley and his friends have 1 

 stripped evolution of its greatest glory, viz., that the result 

 of its operation has been to bring about by persistent 

 bio-economic principles a constant if gradual and often inter- 

 rupted rise of type by higher organisation, greater efficiency 

 and increasing mutuality of relations resulting finally in the 

 ethical human world as we see it in opposition to the blind 

 struggle of forces. 



The older and cruder view did not get over the difficulties 

 of accounting for ethics or (as we have abundantly seen) for 

 economics, for values, for positive and negative physiological 

 factors, for metabolic factors in particular, for digestive trans- 

 formation, etc. It ignored entirely the universal importance 

 of symbiogenetic factors. 



How well justified, more probably than he himself knew 

 of, was Butler when he stated that it will take years to get the 

 evolution theory out of the mess in which the Darwinian school 

 had left it ! 



False thinking must in the end lead up to false action, 

 and ultimately to great catastrophes, as it has done in this 

 case. " Les erreurs de nos jugements produisent 1'ardeur de 

 tous nos desirs," as Rousseau puts it; and Huxley himself so 

 pregnantly warns "practical" people that : "It is a matter 

 of the very greatest importance that our theories of things, and 

 even of things that seem a long way apart from our daily lives, 



