Chap. vi. Utilitarian Doctrine how far true. 1 63 



acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ wilt be formed, 

 as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing 

 an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the 

 good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole 

 advantageous. After the lapse of time, under changing conditions 

 of life, if any part comes to be injurious, it will be modified ; or if it 

 be not so, the being will become extinct as myriads have become 

 extinct. 



Natural selection tends only to make each organic being as 

 perfect as, or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the 

 same country with which it comes into competition. And we see 

 that this is the standard of perfection attained under nature. The 

 endemic productions of New Zealand, for instance, are perfect one 

 compared with another ; but they are now rapidly yielding before 

 the advancing legions of plants and animals introduced from Europe, 

 Natural selection will not produce absolute perfection, nor do we 

 always meet, as far as we can judge, with this high standard under 

 nature. The correction for the aberration of light is said by Muller 

 not to be perfect even in that most perfect organ, the human eye. 

 Helmholtz, whose judgment no one will dispute, after describing 

 in the strongest terms the wonderful powers of the human eye, 

 adds these remarkable words : " That which we have discovered 

 in the way of inexactness and imperfection in the optical machine 

 and in the image on the retina, is as nothing in comparison with the 

 incongruities which we have just come across in the domain of the 

 sensations. One might say that nature has taken delight in accu- 

 mulating contradictions in order to remove all foundation from the 

 theory of a pre-existing harmony between the external and internal 

 worlds." If our reason leads us to admire with enthusiasm a 

 multitude of inimitable contrivances in nature, this same reason 

 tells us, though we may easily err on both sides, that some other 

 contrivances are less perfect. Can we consider the sting of the bee 

 as perfect, which, when used against many kinds of enemies, 

 cannot be withdrawn, owing to the backward serratures, and thus 

 inevitably causes the death of the insect by tearing out its viscera ? 



If we look at the sting of the bee, as having existed in a remote 

 progenitor as a boring and serrated instrument, like that in so many 

 members of the same great order, and that it has since been modi- 

 fied but not perfected for its present purpose, with the poison origi- 

 nally adapted for some other object, such as to produce galls, since 

 intensified, we can perhaps understand how it is that the use of the 

 sting should so often cause the insect's own death : for if on 

 the whole the power of stinging be useful to the social community, 



m 2 



