Emotion 43 



attack would act on the living and impel them 

 to alter their habits and also to change their 

 situation and perhaps their food as well. The 

 whole herd would be affected by the emotion 

 and by the arrest of development that follows. 

 A quick adjustment to new conditions would 

 follow long before natural selection would have 

 time to act. It is said that the elimination of 

 the weak would leave the stronger, and thus 

 cause a development in them. But the survi- 

 vors get an emotion, not a new character. 

 They are modified by it and must shift to 

 a new environment to find a situation nat- 

 ural to their new condition. If the only 

 effects of starvation, disease, or destruction 

 the means through which natural selection acts 

 were on those killed, we might assume that 

 the survivors were improved. But where dis- 

 ease or starvation kills one, it injures hundreds 

 which live to propagate their kind, and for 

 one animal that a beast of prey seizes, a score 

 are shocked by the incident and live on with 

 new emotions. Starvation and disease always 

 leave the survivors on a lower level, where they 

 become more emotional. Any great national 



