40 De Vi Physica 



the very end of his life, he never saw the 

 point of the absurdity, being deceived him- 

 self, as others are still, by a confusion of 

 thought due to a want of analysis. 



III. For the third cause of his success 

 was, and still is, the deceptive snare in 

 the phrase ' Natural Selection/ which is at 

 once a mere truism and an absurd fallacy: 

 most people, including Darwin himself, swal- 

 lowing the fallacy in the truism. 



The truism is, that in any struggle for 

 existence, the fittest survive : the survivors 

 being, ipso facto^ the fittest : truly a mar- 

 vellous discovery ! Then, it being first laid 

 down that the fittest survive, a thing which 

 nobody can deny, the term fittest is illegiti- 

 mately narrowed in meaning, and those forms 

 are always assumed to be the fittest, that 

 possess, and because they possess, some in- 

 finitesimal variation. This infinitesimal vari- 

 ation is arbitrarily supposed to bestow upon 



