336 Habit and Instinct. 



natural selection was meant by Darwin, and should be 

 meant by us, a process whereby in the struggle for exist- 

 ence certain individuals are either killed, or, what is really 

 the essential point, prevented from begetting offspring. 

 Such a process, I take it, plays but a small and insignifi- 

 cant part in social progress, among ourselves, for example. 

 No doubt there is an apparently large body of unskilled 

 workers who are ousted in the keen competition of the 

 labour market. But are they in any appreciable degree 

 eliminated either by death or by exclusion from all share in 

 the procreation of their race ? They may be excluded from 

 the labour market, and thus leave others more fitted than 

 themselves to survive as efficient workers. In that sense, 

 no doubt natural selection is operative in all ranks of 

 human society. But, from the biological point of view, 

 the role of natural selection may be condensed, with almost 

 brutal plainness, into a few words : To breed or not to 

 breed; that is the question. In this sense, and this sense 

 only, is natural selection efficient in race-progress. And 

 it is in this sense that the term is used when I express 

 the conviction that in race-progress among civilized nations 

 natural selection holds an altogether subordinate position. 

 If those who endeavour to apply biological conceptions to 

 social phenomena would only remember that the essence 

 of natural selection is the exclusion of the weakly, the 

 inefficient, and the anywise unfit, from transmitting their 



social evolution. The criticisms called forth by his Eomanes Lecture and the 

 reiterated assertions tliat he had abandoned the naturalistic interpretation of 

 ethical phenomena, together with the defence of his position in the prole- 

 gomena prefixed to this ninth volume, all serve to indicate how essential it 

 is that the method of conscious choice should be clearly distinguished from 

 that of natural selection. What we strive to effect in the social evolu- 

 tion which embodies the results of human choice, is often very different 

 from that which natural selection alone would produce. Our ideals are the 

 products of a mental evolution which has escaped from the bondage of 

 natural selection. 



