40 EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 



wisdom to see on whose side besotted folly lies. As 

 you instinctively know, one sane, practical idealist in 

 a community is worth in point of social efficiency a ton 

 of such self-blinded egoists. The fittest to survive will 

 indeed survive, but this is very different from imagining 

 that in our present concededly imperfect stage of evo- 

 lutionary development, every living organism to-day is 

 necessarily one of the best. Our race can hardly be 

 said to have reached perfection yet. On the contrary, 

 we are being tried out daily, hourly, by a relent- 

 less evolutionary process under which degenerates of 

 all kinds, mental, moral, physical, must inevitably be 

 ultimately wiped out. All that survival of the fittest 

 appears to mean, therefore, is that those types most 

 fitted to withstand life's enemies will continue to live 

 and multiply, while those less adapted will disappear. 

 Hence, did these imperfectly developed or decadent 

 specimens of our race but know it, Nature is as re- 

 morselessly weeding out them, or their posterity, 

 through their very vices, as she is the consumptive and 

 the anemic among individuals, or the dying races among 

 the peoples of the world. 



HUMANITY 



If I were asked to name the distinguishing charac- 

 teristic of our modern Western civilization as contrasted 

 with those that have immediately preceded it, I should 

 answer unhesitatingly, that it appears to consist mainly 

 in an increased regard for all forms of life, both animal 

 and human. If the evolutionary theory had done 



