Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - The Socialist Movement.pdf/250

 246 types of life like some of the armadilloes, and so on.

With man, it is different. If the climate changes, he modifies his clothes and his habitation. He finds out many inventions first of all to defy nature and then to exploit her. In common with some other animals he protects himself by forming groups, and these groups carry on the war of nature. But they nourish and nurture within themselves both individual intelligence and personal and group laws of existence, ethics, customs, justice, religion. And thus a new path of progress is discovered, the path which consists of an intelligent conception of ends and purposes and an adoption of rational means to those ends. Man supplements nature. He robs her, so to speak, of her secrets and he uses them for his own rational purposes. Nature produces everything she can and kills everything she can; man produces what he wants and kills what he does not want. Nature's selection is mechanical, man's selection is rational; nature's selection is accidental, man's selection is purposeful. The partridge is dressed in khaki because nature killed its kith and kin dressed otherwise, man dresses himself in khaki that he may not be killed at all. Human progress is not the result of the: natural law of the survival of the fittest, but of the human art of the making of the fittest. Nature surrounds her children with death, man surrounds his with life. Man, through his intelligence, co-operates with nature and with his fellows in order that he may live.