WITH THE DOMAIN OF THE INORGANIC 57 



intensified cannibalism ; but they have often taken the form, 

 as Darwin emphasised, of some experiment in co-operation 

 and socialisation, of some new departure which gives the next 

 generation a better start in life. All theory apart, our 

 picture of animate nature is fundamentally out of perspec- 

 tive unless we recognise that a large proportion of the time 

 and energy of living creatures, whether in the fighting line 

 or safe for the time being in organised entrenchments, is 

 devoted to securing not self-preservation, but the welfare 

 of the race. Nature, as Goethe said, is continually taking 

 advantage of her children's " capacity for self-forgetful- 

 ness ". 



Whenever the circumstances are critical, and there is in- 

 equality or diversity in the response that living creatures 

 make to their environing difficulties and limitations, a proc- 

 ess of sifting begins to work, the process of discriminate 

 elimination familiarly known as Natural Selection. This 

 also will engage our attention later, but in the meantime 

 let us not assume that the conventional statement of the 

 process tells us the whole truth. Just as the struggle for 

 existence is often more accurately described as an endeavour 

 after well-being, so, in thinking of Nature's sifting, we go 

 astray if we think of it as at all haphazard (that is a con- 

 tradiction in terms), or as directed only to self -preservation, 

 or as being necessarily sanguinary, or as a process in which 

 organisms simply remain like passive branches for the prun- 

 ing-shears. As a sagacious naturalist has well observed, 

 though somewhat too paradoxically, it is not so much that 

 Nature selects the organisms fittest to her; it is rather that 

 each organism selects the natural conditions fittest to itself. 



