90 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



slight and gradual as not to suggest difference of 

 origin or distinction in kind, but, on the contrary, 

 to indicate clearly their kinship and community of 

 origin. Still, these differentiations among the mem- 

 bers, and the consequent differences in their adapta- 

 tion to the Whole, involve a difference in their power 

 to persist amid the mutual competition which their 

 common presence in the Whole implies. In this 

 silent and unconscious competition of tendencies to 

 persist, which is called, in a somewhat exaggerated 

 metaphor, the " struggle for existence," the members 

 of the least adaptation to the Whole must perish 

 earliest, and only those of the highest adaptation 

 will finally survive. Accordingly, by an exaggera- 

 tion akin to that of the former metaphor, we may, in 

 another, name the resulting persistence of the mem- 

 bers most suited to the Whole the " survival of the 

 fittest " ; and as it is the Whole that determines the 

 standard of adaptation, we may also, by figuratively 

 personifying the Whole, call the process of antago- 

 nistic interaction through which the survivors per- 

 sist, a process of "natural selection." Here, now, 

 the points of determining import for inference are 

 these: (i) That the "survival" is only of XhQ fittest 

 to the Whole ; (2) that it is the Whole alone that 

 "selects"; (3) that no "survival," as verifiable by 

 the strictly empirical method, can be taken as per- 

 manent, but that even the latest must be reckoned 



