2 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



progress of each species includes advance in the means of 

 destroying others as well as preserving itself. Nor can it 

 readily be conceded that the various species which thus 

 learn to destroy each other more efficiently are necessarily 

 higher or nobler in type than the ancestral forms from 

 which they are derived. If, indeed, the " higher " type 

 simply means that which is best capable of dealing with the 

 circumstances in which it is placed, then it is undeniably 

 true that the highest survive in the struggle for existence. 

 But the truth is at this point a truism not worth mention- 

 ing but for the mischief which it has wrought. In the 

 current theories of organic evolution, more particularly 

 in the doctrine of Natural Selection, there is nothing 

 whatever to prove that the individuals who prevail over 

 others in the struggle for existence must necessarily be in 

 any way " higher " in the sense which we human beings 

 attach to that word There is nothing in the nature of 

 the struggle itself to show that the type which prevails 

 must always be one which we should recognise as morally 

 better, intellectually more developed, physically more 

 beautiful, or in any way more desirable. It all depends 

 on circumstances. In some parts of Africa the horse is 

 driven out by the Tsetse fly ; in others the white man 

 succumbs before the malaria germ, just as in this country 

 the honest investor goes down before the swindling com- 

 pany promoter. If it be said that in the end the better 

 type will prevail, that man is upon the whole dominant 

 among animals, and honesty upon the whole among men, 

 I do not wish to deny, nor yet at this stage to affirm it. I 

 am only concerned to protest against its being affirmed 

 upon a thoroughly false ground, and in a thoroughly false 

 form. The worst type very often survives, and evolution 

 is not always upwards. 



2. It is not even normally upwards. If we take man as 

 the highest type of animal, and regard the line of evolution 

 which ends in man as the upward line, then, as we know, 

 at every point from the lowest upwards there are countless 

 diverging lines. Evolution is not serial. Its plan is not 

 that of a straight line or even a spiral, but rather that of a 

 tree. For the species that has moved some distance along 



