CHAP, xvii METAPHYSICS OF NATURAL SELECTION 22/ 



ing " what such men call the * necessity ' of putting 

 Him to death," tried strange endeavour ! to 

 " eliminate " Him ! Yet without strain or manifest 

 extravagance the view can be advanced that it was 

 His glory to put the great moral commonplaces into 

 circulation as " current coin." We go to Him for 

 "sweetness and light." He is the truth. We go to 

 Him for transforming warmth, and He makes our 

 cold ideals live, and melts our hearts. 



VI 



Natural selection then does not rule within the 

 sphere of reason. We may now face the question, 

 whether it can be said to account for the first emer- 

 gence of reason and morality ? 



One is reluctant to admit this. Yet it seems as if 

 there was almost the same warrant for ascribing the 

 emergence of reason to natural selection as for im- 

 puting to its agency any other new thing that arises 

 in the course of evolution. Darwin's language we 

 have pronounced ill-balanced. Natural selection does 

 not create. In speaking as if it did, Darwin ignores 

 a co-operating factor of even greater consequence, 

 the capacity for aggregate variation in the material. 

 Moreover, selection out of non-telic elements seems 

 possible, if at all, only in the lower ranges of evolu- 

 tion, where fecundity is greatest. Yet it may be held 

 that reason emerges by means of the process called 

 natural selection, and by means of a process in which 

 natural selection, i.e. struggle and elimination, have 

 certainly played some considerable part. On the as- 

 sumption of evolution all along the line, it is implied 



