Page:Nature and Man.djvu/58

 Divorce, published in 1904, M. Bourget says: 'La lutte entre les espèces, cette inflexible loi de l'univers animal, a sa correspondance exacte dans le monde des idées. Certaines mentalités constituent de véritables espèces intellectuelles qui ne peuvent pas durer à côté les unes des autres' (Édition Plon, p. 317). This inflexible law of the animal universe, the struggle between species, is one which is quite unknown to zoologists. The 'struggle for existence,' to which Darwin assigned importance, is not a struggle between different species, but one between closely similar members of the same species. The struggle between species is by no means universal, but in fact very rare. The preying of one species on another is a moderated affair of balance and adjustment which may be described rather as an accommodation than as a struggle.

A more objectionable misinterpretation of the naturalists' doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is that made by journalists and literary politicians, who declare, according to their political bias, either that science rightly teaches that the gross quality measured by wealth and strength alone can survive and should therefore alone be cultivated, or that science (and especially Darwinism) has done serious injury to the progress of mankind by authorizing this teaching. Both are wrong, and owe their error to self-satisfied flippancy and traditional ignorance in regard to nature-knowledge and the teaching of Darwin. The 'fittest' does not mean the 'strongest.' The causes of survival under Natural Selection are very far indeed from being rightly described as mere strength, nor are they baldly similar to the power of accumulating wealth. Frequently in Nature the more obscure and feeble survive in the struggle because of their modesty and suitability to given conditions, whilst the rich are sent empty away and the mighty perish by hunger.

NOTE 4 (p. 20).

A short discussion of this subject and the introduction of the term 'educability' was published in a paper by me,