SCIENCE AND RELIGION 197 



deavour, Struggle. Sparing only those who will 

 accept the life of ease which we call parasitism 

 Nature has always tended to eliminate the 

 sluggish, the unbalanced, the uncontrolled, the 

 unwholesome. Wild animals in Nature have para- 

 sites, but the occurrence of organic disease amongst 

 them is rare, and its elimination is rapid. Nature 

 is all for health. And for those who get anything 

 of a fair start, health is a curiously sensitive index 

 of morals, and not for the lower reaches only. 



Civilization has indeed mitigated the severity 

 of Nature's Spartan methods, and has thrown off 

 the yoke of Natural Selection, but it has not 

 put an end to struggle nor the need for it. We 

 interfere with Nature's winnowing at every turn, 

 and we are awakening to realize the penalty we 

 have to pay for having abandoned Nature's 

 policy without adopting a really humaner one of 

 our own. We are face to face with ugly and terri- 

 ble social arrears the results of our easy-going 

 regime in which superiority does not necessarily 

 profit by the rewards of superiority, in which 

 inferiority is shielded from the evils it entails.' 

 Since we cannot return to Nature's stern regime, 

 which Plato approved, it behoves us more strenu- 

 ously to substitute for Natural Selection a similar 

 method on a higher turn of the spiral namely, a 

 stringent policy of Rational and Social Selection 

 which will not be afraid to be firm in the present 



