THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LIFE OF OTHERS. 263 



the world, or when wrongly balanced, its disorder and 

 decay. According to evolutional philosophy there are 

 three great marks or necessities of all true develop- 

 ment — Aggregation, or the massing of things ; Differ- 

 entiation, or the varying of things ; and Integration, 

 or the re-uniting of things into higher wholes. All 

 these processes are brought about by sex more per- 

 fectly than by any other factor known. From a care- 

 ful study of this one phenomenon, science could 

 almost decide that Progress was the object of Nature, 

 and that Altruism was the object of Progress. 



This vital relation between Altruism in its early 

 stages and physiological ends, neither implies that it 

 is to be limited by these ends nor defined in terms of 

 them. Everything must begin somewhere. And 

 there is no aphorism which the labors of Evolution, at 

 each fresh beginning, have tended more consistently 

 to endorse than " first that which is natural, then that 

 which is spiritual." How this great saying also dis- 

 poses of the difficulty, which appears and reappears 

 with every forward step in Evolution, as to the quali- 

 tative terms in which higher developments are to be 

 judged, is plain. Because the spiritual to our vision 

 emerges from the natural, or, to speak more accu- 

 rately, is convoyed upwards by the natural for the 

 first stretches of its ascent, it is not necessarily con- 

 tained in that natural, nor is it to be defined in terms 

 of it. What comes "first" is not the criterion of what 

 comes last. Few things are more forgotten in criti- 

 cism of Evolution than that the nature of a thing is 

 not dependent on its origin, that one's whole view of 

 a long, growing, and culminating process is not to be 

 governed by the first sight the microscope can catch 



