CHAR xvii METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 2 1/ 



struggle continues beneath them ; but they, with what- 

 ever limitations and exceptions, are victors, and cham- 

 pions of the world. Concurrently, they have learned 

 again, with certain limitations and exceptions 

 not to struggle a entrance against each other. There 

 follows from these two attainments (once again, with 

 some strange and saddening exceptions among the 

 lower human races) that man has the awful preroga- 

 tive and solemn privilege of dying a natural death. 

 Such a thing is rare in the animal world ; but men 

 drink their cup of pain to the last drop, and pass, it 

 may be, with unbandaged eyes behind the veil, into 

 the unseen. 



Famine. Emergence from struggle with animal 

 competitors may signify nothing better than a liberty 

 to die of famine. Natural selection does not govern 

 the physiological development of men, for they have 

 not overfilled the world ; but a local and temporary 

 over-population not infrequently arises, and famine 

 follows close upon it. Civilisation ought to have other 

 means of coping with such an overplus ; nature treats 

 it as a normal case of animal superabundance, and 

 falls to selecting again by the old eliminating methods. 

 The human harvest is weeded ; the strongest survive, 

 weakened probably not permanently injured ; others 

 succumb. Here then is natural selection at work 

 among men, and conceivably Natural Selection A, if 

 Natural Selection A anywhere exists. Of course it 

 will be much hampered, more hampered than among 

 any of the animals, by the comparatively low rate of 

 fecundity in man, though famine goes a certain way 

 towards remedying that. Among the higher animals, 

 as we saw, evolution has continued no less markedly 



