230 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



reached. The principle of the survival of the fittest 

 has been used to revivify aristocratic ideas by Vacher 

 de Lapouge, Bourget, Ammon, and Nietzsche. But, 

 on the other hand, it has been urged that evil qualities 

 may have an advantage in present conditions ; that 

 a secure aristocratic position removes competition and 

 therefore selection ; that " equality of opportunity " 

 is of the essence of Darwinian progress. Moreover, 

 socialists point to the societies formed by animals 

 for mutual aid and their great " survival value," 

 finding in the lives of the bee and the ant arguments 

 for a communistic order of society, and possibly, also, 

 for a finality of development, which might end by 

 becoming stationary, could such a system of control 

 become universal. The bee world has shown no sign 

 of progress during the two thousand years that it has 

 been under observation. It is rigid, utilitarian, self- 

 sufficing a model for communal life, when human 

 desire and individual initiative have been bred out of 

 the race. In truth, the application of the principle of 

 natural selection to sociology is so complex a problem 

 that almost any school of thought can draw illustra- 

 tions from an endless series of examples, choosing 

 them at will, and may thus obtain valid arguments 

 for their special tenets from the Origin of Species. 



If the influence of the work of Darwin and his 

 successors on sociology has been great, no less pro- 

 found has been its effect on religious 

 Religion. thought The destruction of the crude 



dogma of separate specific acts of creation, though 

 the most immediately obvious, was but the most 

 superficial of its results. 



