AS APPLIED TO MAN. 3851 
could not therefore have been acquired by means of 
natural selection. 
The Origin of some of Man’s Mental Faculties, by the 
preservation of Useful Variations, not possible. 
Turning to the mind of man, we meet with many 
difficulties in attempting to understand, how those 
mental faculties, which are especially human, could 
have been acquired by the preservation of useful 
variations. At first sight, it would seem that such 
feelings as those of abstract justice and benevolence 
could never have been so acquired, because they are 
incompatible with the law of the strongest, which is 
the essence of natural selection. But this is, I think, 
an erroneous view, because we must look, not to indi- 
viduals but to societies; and justice and benevolence, 
exercised towards members of the same tribe, would 
certainly tend to strengthen that tribe, and give it 
a superiority over another in which the right of the 
strongest prevailed, and where consequently the weak 
and the sickly were left to perish, and the few strong 
ruthlessly destroyed the many who were weaker. 
But there is another class of human faculties that 
do not regard our fellow men, and which cannot, 
therefore, be thus accounted for. Such are the capa- 
city to form ideal conceptions of space and time, of 
eternity and infinity—the capacity for intense artistic 
feelings of pleasure, in form, colour, and composition— 
and for those abstract notions of form and number 
which render geometry and arithmetic possible. How 
