432 MIND IN EVOLUTION CHAP. 



Happiness as an end is something very different from life 

 as an end. There have been important sects which have 

 even held the suppression of life, or of important elements 

 in life, essential to man's temporal or eternal happiness. 

 And apart from abnormalities of this kind, one may say 

 generally that to live well is not the same thing as to live. 

 Happiness does not mean necessarily increased quantity of 

 life, but a special quality. 



The second point is what we may call the relativity of 

 Happiness. The conceptions of value are, as we have 

 hinted, largely a matter of social tradition ; largely, again, 

 dependent on religious belief. Thus, apart from philoso- 

 phic analysis and reflection, they are to be numbered among 

 those determining conceptions of life which grow up in 

 a spontaneous semi-unconscious way with the life of 

 society. And taking the world over from China to Peru, 

 they may differ within very wide limits. No doubt here, 

 as lower in the scale, natural selection operating in the 

 background keeps a certain check on the growth of ideas. 

 If the conception of well-being comes to conflict too vio- 

 lently with the real conditions of life, the society which it 

 dominates will obviously tend to succumb. The ideal of 

 celibacy, for example, can only weed out the community 

 or the class which faithfully puts it in practice. But gene- 

 rally speaking natural selection drives humanity with a 

 sufficiently loose rein. Man is by so much the most 

 dominant of animals, that he can afford himself a good 

 deal of latitude, and yet preserve himself from destruction. 



8. This latitude is indeed a necessary condition of the 

 highest development. Natural selection can preserve and 

 augment nothing that is not immediately useful. If the 

 pigment-fleck which is the first rudimentary germ of the 

 eye is preserved and developed, it must be because it is 

 useful as a pigment-fleck. The plea that it will later 

 develop into a magnificent sense-organ of the highest 

 possible utility could not avail it in the court of natural 

 selection unless it could prove services actually rendered 

 by itself. So is it with all the faculties ; and most of 

 all with the higher faculties of man. The philosopher, 

 as Plato's contemporaries complained, occupies himself 



