54 The Biological Errors 



and obvious facts of existence in favour of the 

 unusual and abnormal; and second, to a mis- 

 understanding of the terms ' ' struggle for existence" 

 and "survival of the fittest" as used by Darwin. 



Those who believe in the distorted form of 

 ** social Darwinism," obsessed by the idea of 

 struggle, forget entirely the greatest struggle 

 of all, the struggle of man against his physical en- 

 vironment, because it is so common and so omni- 

 present. The relations of men to the universe 

 are infinitely closer than those of men to each 

 other. A man may live for years without contact 

 with other men, like Alexander Selkirk, whose 

 experiences have been given literary form in 

 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but the necessity for 

 adaptation to the physical universe is constant. 

 Man, in common with all animals, is compelled 

 to engage in a continual effort to maintain a 

 constant temperature. He cannot- live more than 

 a few minutes without air, or a few days with- 

 out water, or a few weeks without food. The 

 danger from disease germs is always present. 

 The greatest waste of the philosophy of force and 

 the war system consists in the fact that, having 

 accustomed us to consider collective homicide as 

 the source of all civilization, it diverts our energies 

 and our attentions from the real struggle against 

 the external universe and the common enemies of 

 mankind to the destructive struggle against the 

 artificial enemies whom we create, on account of 

 false ideas, out of other parts of the human race. 



