APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS loi 



instead of sinking to their natural place at the bottom, 

 the struggle for the means of enjoyment would 

 ensure a constant circulation of the human units of 

 the social compound, from the bottom to the top and 

 from the top to the bottom. The survivors of the 

 contest, those who continued to form the great bulk 

 of the polity, would not be those " fittest " who got 

 to the very top, but the great body of the moderately 

 "fit," whose numbers and superior propagative 

 power enable them always to swamp the exception- 

 ally endowed minority. 



I think it must be obvious to every one that, 

 whether we consider the internal or the external 

 interests of society, it is desirable they should be in 

 the hands of those w^ho are endow^ed with the 

 largest share of energy, of industry, of intellectual 

 capacity, of tenacity of purpose, while they are not 

 devoid of sympathetic humanity ; and, in so far as 

 the struggle for the means of enjoyment tends to 

 place such men in possession of wealth and influ- 

 ence, it is a process which tends to the good of 

 society. But the process, as we have seen, has 

 no real resemblance to that which adapts living 

 beings to current conditions in the state of nature ; 

 nor any to the artificial selection of the horticul- 

 turist. 



CCXXXVIII 



Even should the w^hole human race be absorbed in 

 one vast polity, within which " absolute political jus- 

 tice " reigns, the struggle for existence with the state 

 of nature outside it, and the tendency to the return of the 

 struggle within, in consequence of over-multiplication, 

 will remain ; and, unless men's inheritance from the 

 ancestors wrho fought a good fight in the state of 

 nature, their dose of original sin, is rooted out by 

 some method at present unrevealed, at any rate to 

 disbelievers in supernaturalism, every child born into 

 the world will still bring with him the instinct of 



