Heredity in Man. 335 



be the elimination of drunkenness and sensuality * ; society 

 is at war with the criminal, and doing its best, so far as 

 the sometimes short-sighted leniency of public opinion will 

 permit, to eliminate him. But, when all is said and done, 

 natural selection plays but a subordinate part in the life of 

 civilized mankind. The method of conscious choice has in 

 large degree superseded that of natural selection. 



Now we must use the phrase " natural selection " in its 

 biological acceptation, and not, as is so often done in 

 discussions on social evolution, in a vague general and 

 half metaphorical sense, through neglecting the difference 

 between natural selection through the elimination of 

 failures, and choice through the play of intelligence.! By 



* I leave this passage as it stood in the MS. of my Lowell Lectures. Dr. 

 G. A. Reid has since published a work on "The Present Evolution of Man," 

 in which the point is worked out with great care and skill. He contends 

 that drunkenness and the excessive opium habit tends to disappear in com- 

 munities wherein the free use of these drugs has led to the elimination of 

 Ihose who abused them to a fatally deleterious extent. 



t As before noted, Mr. S. Alexander, in his interesting contributions in 

 the domain of ethics, fails to distinguish between natural selection and con- 

 scious choice. " The war of natural selection," he says, " is carried on in 

 human affairs not against weaker or incompatible individuals, but against 

 their ideals or modes of life. It does not suffer any mode of life to prevail or 

 persist but one which is compatible with social welfare." "Persuasion and 

 education, in fact, without destruction, replace here the process of propagation 

 of its own species and destruction of the rival ones, by which in the natural 

 world species become numerically strong and persistent." And again, 

 " Persuasion corresponds to the extermination of the rivals." But, as Mr. 

 Alexander himself indicates, persuasion is the condition, not to natural 

 selection through elimination, but to conscious choice. We endeavour 

 by persuasion to induce others to choose the ideals which have been the 

 objects of our own choice. This is not natural selection ; and the loose 

 application of this term to the process can result only in a confusion of ideas. 

 (See " Moral Order and Progress," and an article on " Natural Selection in 

 Morals " in the International Journal of Ethics, vol. ii. (1882), pp. 409, 439.) 

 It is instructive to compare Professor Huxley's treatment of ethical and social 

 problems with that of Mr. Alexander. No one can read the ninth volume of 

 Huxley's " Collected Essays," that on "Evolution and Ethics" without 

 seeing that he clearly perceived the distinction between the method of 

 natural selection and that of conscious choice which supersedes it in 



