MISSING FACTOR IN CURRENT THEORIES 17 



There is, in point of fact, a second factor which 

 one might venture to call the Struggle for the 

 Life of Others, which plays an equally prominent 

 part. Even in the early stages of development, 

 its contribution is as real, while in the world's 

 later progress — under the name of Altruism — 

 it assumes a sovereignty before which the earlier 

 Struggle sinks into insignificance. That this second 

 form of Struggle should all but have escaped the 

 notice of Evolutionists is the more unaccountable 

 since it arises, like the first, out of those fundamental 

 functions of living organisms which it is the main 

 business of biological science to investigate. The 

 functions discharged by all living things, plant and 

 animal, are two ^ in number. The first is Nutrition, 

 the second is Reproduction. The first is the basis 

 of the Struggle for Life ; the second, of the Struggle 

 for the Life of Others. These two functions run 

 their parallel course — or spiral course, for they 

 continuously intertwine — from the very dawn of 

 life. They are involved in the fundamental nature 

 of protoplasm itself. They affect the entire round 

 of life; they determine the whole morphology of 

 living things ; in a sense they are life. Yet, in 



* There is a third function— that of Co-relation — but, to avoid 

 confusing the immediate issue, this may remain at present in 

 the background. 



