1250 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



of organisation and the reaching of a higher life." These are most 

 forcible and wise sentences. 



The biologist has to emphasise the struggle for existence. His 

 study of animate nature shows him that things of value are gained 

 and are kept by struggle and endeavour. But we must get back to 

 Darwin's conception of the struggle for existence, which was so 

 wide and so wise. He insisted that the struggle for existence is a 

 formula to include all the endeavours which are made against 

 environing limitations and difficulties, all the answers-back in the 

 endless clash of life with things. At the one pole there is sharpening 

 of teeth and claws; at the other pole there is the gathering of 2,379 

 feathers to make the quilted nest of the long-tailed tit. Darwin 

 pointed out that both these are included in the biological concept of 

 the struggle for existence, which includes all the endeavours that 

 creatures make against environing difficulties and limitations. At 

 the one pole, from the Amoeba to man, there is cannibalism; and at 

 the other pole there is self-subordinating parental care and many 

 a form of mutual aid. One pair of blue tits on a long summer day of 

 sixteen hours brought to their nestlings two thousand caterpillars, 

 which, from the nestlings' point of view, was a fine exhibition of 

 parental care. 



To put it in a sentence — man's endeavour must be not only to 

 prevent relapse to the cruder forms of the struggle for existence, of 

 which the crudest is cannibalism ; but to rise to the higher forms of 

 the struggle for existence in which effort becomes an endeavour 

 after well-being. What is the biological coimselr' There must be 

 segregation. One is very tired of the Jukes family, but when five 

 bad women in less than a century and a half can have six hundred 

 mentally defective descendants there is something very badly wrong. 

 There must be some segregation. And then one must welcome, 

 although it is sometimes very hard, sound social selection, when what 

 we would call efficiency tests are enforced, and a man who is thriftless 

 and lazy and irresponsible is shifted. He cannot be eliminated, but 

 he can be shifted. There is also need for a more carefully eugenic 

 criticism of expenditure, which is a very powerful lever; and there 

 is the education of public opinion against ob-selection, as in adver- 

 tising for a gardener "without encumbrances", or in dismissing a 

 female teacher when she marries, or in founding fellowships which 

 involve celibacy. And again, there is the education of public opinion 

 against those marriages which sow tares amid good wheat. 



Sixthly, the biologist feels keenly the danger of false simplicity. 

 He himself suffers so much from the false simplicity of the mate- 

 rialists, who insist that chemistry and physics accoimt for all the 

 phenomena of life, that he is very sensitive to false simplicity in 

 other fields. No doubt there is a legitimate and indispensable and 



