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80 EVOLUTION AND ETHICS IT 



one as the other. The thief and the murderer 

 follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. 

 Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and 

 the evil tendencies of man may have come about ; 

 but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any 

 better reason why what we call good is preferable 

 to what we call evil than we had before. Some 

 day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understand- 

 ing of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty ; but 

 all the understanding in the world will neither 

 increase nor diminish the force of the intuition 

 that this is beautiful and that is ugly. 



There is another fallacy which appears to me to 

 pervade the so-called " ethics of evolution." It is 

 the notion that because, on the whole, animals 

 and plants have advanced in perfection of organ- 

 ization by means of the struggle for existence and 

 the consequent ' survival of the fittest' ; therefore 

 men in society, men as ethical beings, must look 

 to the same process to help them towards per- 

 fection. I suspect that this fallacy has arisen out 

 of the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrase ' sur- 

 vival of the fittest.' ' Fittest ' has a connotation of 

 ' best ' ; and about ' best ' there hangs a moral 

 flavour. In cosmic nature, however, what is 

 ' fittest ' depends upon the conditions. Long since, 19 

 I ventured to point out that if our hemisphere 

 were to cool again, the survival of the fittest might 

 bring about, in the vegetable kingdom, a popula- 

 tion of more and more stunted and humbler and 



