xxii INTRODUCTION 



an automatic law which can be left to itself. On the 

 contrary, I believed that there was no upward tendency in 

 things as such, that apart from the operations of the human 

 mind, the struggle for existence ruled, that the sun of its 

 favour shone impartially on the just and the unjust, and the 

 east wind of its implacable severity nipped the buds of 

 loveliest promise as readily as the garden weeds. Not only 

 so, but until the mind should come into its kingdom man 

 himself was subject to the same rule. The struggle for 

 existence was not the cause of mind, but mind had to 

 undergo the struggle for existence. Each animal species 

 that relied on a dawning intelligence for its living had to 

 maintain itself against others that might be harder of shell 

 or stouter of limb. Each race of man that made some 

 advance in ideas, in industry or the social arts had to fight 

 for its place. There was no a priori reason to suppose that 

 it would survive. Its mental development would be on 

 the whole an advantage, but it would only be one advan- 

 tage among many possibilities, and a higher birth-rate, a 

 tougher hide, stouter muscles, or greater power of resist- 

 ance to some microbe might easily turn the scale of any 

 conflict in favour of a rival race of lower mental endowment. 

 It was therefore clearly possible, and the historical record 

 showed that it was the fact, that the higher type may often 

 be beaten by the lower, and beaten to extinction so far as 

 its achievements in civilisation are concerned. Only if 

 mind should once reach the point at which it could control 

 all the conditions of its life, could this danger be perma- 

 nently averted. Now it seemed to me that it is precisely 

 on this line that modern civilisation has made its chief 

 advance, that through science it is beginning to control the 

 physical conditions of life, and that on the side of ethics 

 and religion it is forming those ideas of the unity of the 

 race, and of the subordination of law, morals and social 



