CHAP, xx SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 283 



a factor in the cosmos, and of history as the embodi- 

 ment of human reason. This we might treat as re- 

 ducing the position ad absurdnm. Against such 

 extravagances not metaphysicians only protest, but 

 evolutionists, like Darwin, 1 Professor Karl Pearson, 

 Professor Lloyd Morgan. They have shown us in 

 their capacity as men of science how intelligence, as 

 it arises in the animal world, limits, and finally ban- 

 ishes, natural selection. We have further seen that, 

 while faithful to the conception of progress by elimi- 

 nation, Mr. Sutherland does not himself succeed in 

 assuming the kind of elimination implied in true 

 natural selection, viz. starvation or violent slaughter 

 due to struggle. 



Drummond did not definitely challenge natural 

 selection. Probably he was a believer, and had no 

 intention of excluding its operation from human 

 society. He tried to show, mainly in the brute world, 

 that it had limitations. The argument as he states it 

 seems precarious, inadequate, and, in the light of a 

 better philosophy, unnecessary. 



We again find pure Darwinism, or rather pure 

 natural selectionism hyper-Darwinism, a Darwin- 

 ism that goes beyond the master asserted by Mr. 

 Kidd following the lines of Weismann. We held his 

 physiological basis to be insecure, and his sociological 

 inferences illegitimate, even if it were possible to 



1 Darwin's denial of natural selection among the civilised is found 

 in Descent of Man, pp. 143, 618, quoted in Mr. K. Pearson's Chances 

 of Death, etc., i. pp. 127, 128. This may be set against the anti-ethi- 

 cal suggestions of Darwin regarding bee-murder. While he was 

 tempted to interpret the higher by the lower in evolution, he was not 

 pledged to that error. 



