334 THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 
impress upon us, that “natural selection” has no power 
to produce absolute perfection but only relative perfec- 
tion, no power to advance any being much beyond 
his fellow beings, but only just so much beyond them 
as to enable it to survive them in the struggle for 
existence. Still less has it any power to produce 
modifications which are in any degree injurious to its 
possessor, and Mr. Darwin frequently uses the strong 
expression, that a single case of this kind would be 
fatal to his theory. If, therefore, we find in man any 
characters, which all the evidence we can obtain goes 
to show would have been actually injurious to him on 
their first appearance, they could not possibly have 
been produced by natural selection. Neither could 
any specially developed organ have been so produced 
if it-had been merely useless to him, or if its use were 
not proportionate to its degree of development. Such 
cases as these would prove, that some other law, or 
some other power, than “natural selection” had been 
at work. But if, further, we could see that these 
very modifications, though hurtful or useless at the 
time when they first appeared, became in the highest 
degree useful at a much later period, and are now 
essential to the full moral and intellectual development 
of human nature, we should then infer the action of 
mind, foreseeing the future and preparing for it, just 
as surely as we do, when we see the breeder set himself 
to work with the determination to produce a definite 
improvement in some cultivated plant or domestic 
animal. I would further remark that this enquiry is 
