Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/239

Rh living person and thing—la chasse au bonheur—the hunt for happiness.'

'And I still give in my adherence, savage or otherwise, to that theory of life.'

'It has grave defects.'

'Let us have some of them.'

'Well, firstly, like all formulæ it is far too narrow. When you try to explain the earth as it is—man as he is—civilisation as it is, by any formula whatever, you have to leave out nearly half of the facts. The celebrated theory of the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, for instance, leads us into the most hopeless errors unless we perpetually remember that the word "fittest" has here no ethical sense whatever, and merely means fittest under any given set of circumstances. The lower type may be the fittest, and among parasites we see that it is so. But even when we have realised this, which nine evolutionists out of ten practically do not, we are still far away from our comfortable and complete little 'Open Sesame' for the big treasure-cave of life. The complexity of things eludes us. The struggle for existence has continually to be applied altruistically. The individual often perishes to save, or try to save—not itself but another individual, or a few other individuals, or many, for the sake of some idea, sometimes of a character almost wholly abstract.