Struggle for Existence. All the various forms of life are 

 warring for the means of subsistence, each striving to ob- 

 tain for itself the best nourishment, etc. In this struggle 

 those organisms will be victorious which possess the most 

 favorable characteristics ; all others must succumb. Hence 

 those only will survive which are best adapted to their 

 environment. But between those which survive, the 

 struggle begins anew, and when the favoring peculiarities 

 become more pronounced in some, (by chance, of course) 

 these in turn win out. Thus Nature gradually improves 

 her various breeds through the continued action of a self- 

 regulating mechanism. Such are the main features of 

 Darwinism, its real kernel, about which of course, — and 

 this is a proof of its insufficiency, — from the very beginning 

 a number of auxiliary hypotheses attached themselves. 



Darwin's theory sounds so clear and simple, and 

 seems at first blush so luminous that it is nO' wonder if 

 many careful naturalists regarded it as an incontrovertible 

 truth. The warning voice of the more prudent men of 

 science was silenced by the loud enthusiasm of the younger 

 generation over the solution of the greatest of the world- 

 problems: the genesis of living beings had been brought to 

 light, and — a thing which admitted of no doubt — man as 

 well as the brute creation was a product of purely natural 

 evolution. The doctrine which materialisin had already 

 proclaimed with prophetic insight, had at length been 

 irrefragably established on a scientific basis: God, Soul ar.d 

 Immortality were contemptuously relegated to the domain 

 of nursery tales. What further use was there for a God 



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