CHAP, xvii METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 223 



But, if it were the best thing in the world, man- 

 kind cannot make use of natural selection. We 

 must keep each other alive and well, as far as we 

 may ; humanity insists upon it. In point of fact, the 

 civilised races are putting their chief reliance, for 

 biological progress or safety, upon forces of a very 

 different kind. There is first for we are speaking 

 here of man's physique the provision, by laws and 

 by administration, of a sanitary material environment; 

 next comes the advance of medical skill, the diffusion 

 of medical and sanitary knowledge, public opinion, 

 law (requiring and forbidding certain individual acts), 

 morality, religion. That is the line we must move on, 

 whether we like it or not. And we have no reason 

 whatever to suppose that we should get better results 

 by " following nature " in a more brutal fashion. 



In sociology Mr. Benjamin Kidd has claimed that 

 all our salvation lies in natural selection, failing which 

 " panmixia " entails retrogression. This is really bio- 

 logical rather than sociological doctrine, and probably 

 or certainly it is bad biology. There is little or no 

 true struggle for existence among human beings ; 

 thank God for that ! Reason and our moral nature 

 make it impossible ; and yet we seem to have escaped 

 retrogression. Mr. Kidd dwells on the necessity of 

 struggle, while he says nothing about elimination ; 

 and he applies his supposed biological truths directly 

 to the human animal. Reason is held to affect the 

 process chiefly in a dangerous way. It makes men 

 clever, no doubt, but it makes them too selfish to strug- 

 gle in the interests of the species, unless religion had 

 come in to keep us up to the mark. Social evolution 



