THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 

 IN HUMAN SOCIETY 1 



THE vast and varied procession of events, which we 

 call Nature, affords a sublime spectacle and an inexhaus- 

 tible wealth of attractive problems to the speculative 

 observer. If we confine our attention to that aspect 

 which engages the attention of the intellect, nature ap- 

 pears a beautiful and harmonious whole, the incarnation 

 of a faultless logical process, from certain premises in 

 the past to an inevitable conclusion in the future. But 

 if it be regarded from a less elevated, though more hu- 

 man, point of view; if our moral sympathies are allowed 



1 This essay appeared in the Nineteenth Century for February, 

 1888, and was prefixed as an introductory essay to a pamphlet, 

 Social Diseases and Worse Remedies, 1891. Huxley said that 

 the purpose of the essay was to state the principles that in his 

 opinion lay at the bottom of the "social question." "So far as 

 Individualism and Regimental Socialism are concerned, this paper 

 simply emphasizes and expands the opinions expressed in an 

 address to the members of the Midland Institute, delivered seven- 

 teen years earlier, and still more fully developed in several essays 

 published in the "Nineteenth Century" in 1889, which I hope, 

 before long, to republish. 



"The fundamental proposition which runs through the writings, 

 which thus extend over a period of twenty years, is, that the 

 common a priori doctrines and methods of reasoning about 

 political and social questions are essentially vicious; and that 

 argumentation on this basis leads, with equal force, to two con- 

 tradictory and extremely mischievous systems, the one that of 

 Anarchaic Individualism, the other that of despotic or Regi- 

 mental Socialism." Evol. and Ethics, 189-190. Administrative, 

 Nihilism was the address to the members of the Midland Institute. 

 The essays from the Nineteenth Century referred to were published 

 in Collected Essays 1:290-430 and 1X1147-187. 



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