22 DARWINISM AND POLITICS. 



ing out that, though the physical well-being of 

 the race may have suffered through the mitiga- 

 tion of the primitive struggle and the con- 

 sequent preservation of weaklings, we have 

 gained some intellectual advance through the 

 occasional chance of a Newton and a moral 

 advance through the cultivation of sympathy 

 and tenderness, 1 in such a position is there not 

 some inconsistency, some sacrifice of natural 

 selection in favour of human selection con- 

 sciously or half-consciously directed to other 

 ends than those of mere nature ? Our attention 

 is thus called to another factor in that universal 

 strife which is the story of the universe. So 

 soon as a sufficient social development and a 

 sufficiently advanced type of language make it 

 possible, there begins a competition between 

 ideas. The age of conflict is, in Bagehot's 

 phrase, 2 succeeded by " the age of discussion," 

 and the ideas, which rise in the minds of men 

 with the same tendency to variation that we find 

 throughout nature, compete with one another 

 for sustenance and support. The conception of 

 natural selection may be applied here also to 



1 E. Clodd, Story of Creation, p. 211. 



2 Physics and Politics. 



