84 CHARLES DARWIK 



upon a glimpse of the same great truth, strange to say 

 without perceiving the width and scope of its implica- 

 tions. ' All mankind,' he wrote in that year in an essay 

 on population in the ' Westminster Review/ ' in turn 

 subject themselves more or less to the discipline de- 

 scribed; they either may or may not advance under 

 it; but, in the nature of things, only those who do 

 advance under it eventually survive. For, necessarily, 

 families and faces whom this increasing difficulty of 

 getting a living which excess of fertility entails does 

 not stimulate to improvements in production .... are 

 on the high road to extinction ; and must ultimately be 

 supplanted by those whom the pressure does so stimu- 

 late. . . . And here, indeed, without further illustra- 

 tion, it will be seen that premature death, under all its 

 forms, and from all its causes, cannot fail to work in the 

 same direction. For as those prematurely carried off 

 must, in the average of cases, be those in whom the 

 power of self-preservation is the least, it unavoidably 

 follows that those left behind to continue the race must 

 be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the 

 greatest, must be the select of their generation.' In 

 this striking pre-Darwinian passage we have a partial 

 perception of what Mr. Spencer afterwards described as 

 the survival of the fittest ; but, as our great philosopher 

 himself remarks, it ' shows how near one may be to a 

 great generalisation without seeing it.' For not only 

 does Mr. Spencer, like Wells before him, limit the 

 application of the principle to the case of humanity; 

 but, unlike Wells, he overlooks the all-important factor 

 of spontaneous variation, and the power of natural 

 selection, acting upon such, to produce specific and 



