SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST 39 



err against the law of race survival. Mistakes of 

 intelligence in recognizing what constitutes the real 

 general good would seem to retard his progress quite 

 as materially as excessive emotionalism. Whether the 

 evils resulting from over-emotionalism in fear and 

 love have proved any greater to our race than those 

 resulting from defective intellect and excess of im- 

 agination, is a nice question, but hardly pertinent to 

 the present inquiry. Few things, however, are more 

 suggestive to a thinking mind to-day than to contem- 

 plate the heavy self-complacency with which the 

 average man in the street persists in misinterpreting 

 Spencer's catch-phrase, the survival of the fittest. It 

 subtly tickles his vanity to believe that he is one of the 

 fittest, i.e., the present best, as he reads the intellectual 

 legend, evolved out of a. prolonged period of upward 

 evolutionary stress. It soothes his conscience to 

 believe that in this struggle for life wherein he thinks 

 he has issued triumphant, he is justified in adopting 

 the ethical standards of the jungle as between differing 

 races of animals. Had Spencer realized how his 

 catch-phrase would be quoted in canting self-justifica- 

 tion by every semi-educated exploiter of mankind who 

 prefers to remain animal and prey upon human beings 

 rather than to rise to the dignity of manhood, I imagine 

 he would gladly have amplified or qualified the phrase 

 to meet such cases of limited intelligence. For these are 

 the ones that sin against the survival of their own kind, 

 those who sneer or scoff at the ideals of their own race. 

 And yet it would not seem to require superhuman 



