198 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE 



so that we may be less cruel to the future. We 

 cannot return to Nature's tactics, but we must 

 adhere to her strategy or perish miserably. 



Huxley insisted with his usual incisiveness 

 that our only chance of ethical progress was to 

 combat the cosmic process, for what he saw in 

 Nature was a vast gladiatorial show, a ubiquitous 

 Ishmaelitism, every living creature for itself and 

 extinction taking the hindmost. But he did not 

 adequately appreciate the fact that throughout 

 the struggle for existence in Nature, there is often 

 a pathway to survival and success through in- 

 creased co-operation, kindliness, and mutual aid, 

 as well as through increased competition and 

 self-assertion. And it is this line of combination 

 and mutual aid that man must especially follow; 

 it is the one he has followed in making some of his 

 greatest advances. 



Moreover, is it not generally admitted that 

 the moral ideal is one of self-realization by work- 

 ing for our social group, by being good citizens 

 in fact, a self-realization which implies our 

 private subordination to the general weal? And 

 is not this the deeper aspect of Nature's strategy, 

 that the individual living creature realizes itself 

 in its inter-relations, and has to submit to being 

 lost that the welfare of the whole may be served? 

 There is much indeed to be said for the thesis: 

 that the ideals of ethical progress through love 



