CHAP, vii EVOLUTION IN DARWIN 69 



the rest, some sink below the average. How far this 

 tendency to vary went, Darwin never dogmatically 

 affirmed. It was enough for him usually to treat it 

 as casual and therefore as undefined. The great 

 concern of nature, the arch examiner, was not to 

 secure good candidates, but to secure a plentiful 

 flow. If there were but enough, some good speci- 

 mens would assuredly be found. So said, so done ; 

 teeming nature, as we call it, brought forth all things 

 abundantly, ay, and superabundantly ; not monoto- 

 nously, in mechanical batches, but with minute yet 

 important differences ; the result was continuous ad- 

 justment, and adaptation, and evolution, and improve- 

 ment, at the cost of a heavy and remorseless "pluck," 

 year after year, age after age. Finally, what varia- 

 tion, and struggle, and selection have beaten out, 

 heredity preserves. Within the limits of variation 

 heredity perpetuates, in the offspring, the good and 

 victorious qualities of the parents. 



This, in very rough and brief outline, is the central 

 portion of Darwin's hypothesis, the doctrine of 

 natural selection through struggle. When this doc- 

 trine is applied to morals or politics, we have Darwin- 

 ism in morals or politics. Where this doctrine is ab- 

 sent or subordinate, we may have evolutionism in 

 morals or politics ; Darwinism we have not. In this 

 lay Darwin's superiority over many evolutionist prede- 

 cessors, he had laid his finger upon a vera causa, an 

 undeniable fact in nature, the abundance of off- 

 spring, or otherwise roughly stated the scanti- 

 ness of food; upon an undeniable tendency in na- 

 ture ; a tendency to improve and modify all living 

 forms, improving them, i.e., so far as to make 



