80 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. n 



one as the other. The thief and the murderer 

 follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. 

 Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and 

 the evil tendencies of man may have come about; 

 but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any 

 better reason why what we call good is preferable 

 to what we call evil than we had before. Some 

 day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understand- 

 ing of the evolution of the aBsthetic faculty; but 

 all the understanding in the world will neither 

 increase nor diminish the force of the intuition 

 that this is beautful and that is ugly. 



There is another fallacy which appears to me 

 to pervade the so-called " ethics of evolution." It 

 is the notion that because, on the whole, animals 

 and plants have advanced in perfection of organi- 

 zation by means of the struggle for existence and 

 the consequent " survival of the fittest "; there- 

 fore men in society, men as ethical beings, must 

 look to the same process to help them towards 

 perfection. I suspect that this fallacy has arisen 

 out of the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase 

 " survival of the fittest." " Fittest " has a conno- 

 tation of " best "; and about " best " there hangs 

 a moral flavour. In cosmic nature, however, what 

 is " fittest " depends upon the conditions. Long 

 since, 19 I ventured to point out that if our hemi- 

 sphere were to cool again, the survival of the fit- 

 test might bring about, in the vegetable kingdom, 

 a population of more and more stunted and hum- 



