CHAP, vin EVOLUTION IN SPENCER 79 



Alexander did not seriously mean to include the 

 physical " universe " in his Darwinian scheme. Com- 

 peting organisms we know ; are competing universes 

 anything better than a delirious dream ? Organisms 

 die out, not because they are too ill-balanced for the 

 tasks of life, but because they are, on the whole, in 

 their own environment, inferior to other organisms, 

 and therefore succumb in the competition. We must 

 go back to very early "pioneers of evolution" to 

 Democritus or Empedocles if we are to find sur- 

 vival of the fittest seriously applied to the cosmic 

 process. Yet its logical possibility is pressed upon 

 us by so distinguished a man of science, philosopher, 

 and theist as Hermann Lotze. " With reference to 

 the past, we are at liberty to assume that at first an 

 innumerable multitude of inharmonious forms, intrin- 

 sically hostile to any end, actually emerged from the 

 reciprocal impact of blind elements ; that these forms, 

 however, were not able to maintain themselves in the 

 course of nature, as against the contrary assaults 

 from without; that on the contrary only those few 

 held out which had chanced to be the more fortu- 

 nate ; that then these fortunate ones exerted more 

 and more a determining influence upon the rest; 

 and that thus gradually it has come to pass that 

 nature runs its course, not indeed in complete and 

 perfect conformity to an end, but after all to such an 

 extent that there still remain but few disturbances or 

 interferences by which the development and perpetu- 

 ation of the structures that are conformable to an end 

 is endangered. In this way, therefore, it would not 

 be unthinkable that an original chaos gradually 

 shaped itself into a nature that is arranged in con- 



