COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



theory that man is morally the lowest of crea- 

 tures, having been rendered thoroughly unsound 

 by the eating of the apple in Eden. It is need- 

 less to say that science offers a very different 

 explanation. It follows from our inquiry into 

 the causes of organic evolution/ that the ad- 

 justments which tend to maintain the highest 

 fulness of life can be kept up only by natural 

 selection or by direct equilibration. Now we 

 have already had occasion to notice that in the 

 human race, partly on account of the extreme 

 complexity of its individual organization, partly 

 on account of superadded social conditions, the 

 action of natural selection is to a great extent 

 checked. I do not allude to the fact that the 

 supremely important human sympathies, which 

 have grown up in the course of social evolution, 

 compel us to protect the idle and intemperate, so 

 that, instead of starving, they are " enabled to 

 multiply at the expense of the capable and in- 

 dustrious." For far deeper than this lies the 

 circumstance that " there are so many kinds of 

 superiorities which severally enable men to sur- 

 vive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiori- 

 ties, that natural selection cannot by itself rec- 

 tify any particular unfitness ; especially if, as 

 usually happens, there are coexisting unfitnesses 

 which all vary independently." ^ In a race of 



1 See above. Part II. chap. xii. 

 ^ Spencer, op. cit. i. 284. [§ 126.] 

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