Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/596

580 The importance of the theory of evolution in this connection is, that it is found to lay bare certain fundamental uniformities which underlie all the embarrassing variations of nature's procedure. Those moralists, therefore, who would follow nature, unquestioningly acknowledge their allegiance to these principles. They believe in the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest,—believe in them, that is to say, not simply as facts, but as principles for the guidance of human conduct. In their minds seems also to enter another motive,—an acceptance of the inevitable, a spirit of conformity with the universal and necessary, the acquiescence of the individual in the world-order which he is helpless to modify,—a phase of the old sentiment: 'Whatever is, is right.'

On such grounds a radical egoism has been defended, involving outright cruelty, or at least a narrowing of altruistic interests, together with an entire unscrupulousness in the ways and means of economic and political competition. Or, again, a policy of laissez faire has been urged. Progress, measured in some external way, has been set up as the moral end; and since the struggle for existence appears to be a prime condition of progress, benevolence, as an interference with this struggle, has been condemned as a thoroughly mistaken principle of conduct.

There have been two ways of contesting these and similar positions. The first is that taken by men who expressly or tacitly allow some force to the underlying principle of the imitation of nature, but who are disposed to interpret the evolutionary standard somewhat differently. They point out that the struggle for existence is only metaphorically a struggle; that animal nature is by no means to be set down as pure egoism. They point to innumerable examples of so-called altruism in sub-human nature,—especially in the devotion of parents to their young,—and regard these examples as affording a sufficient precedent for the justification of human charity.

The other mode of attack is that of Huxley in the Romanes lecture. Realizing that, if precedent were necessary, the conduct of the animal world was far from affording a sufficient justification for the enormous extension of altruistic ways and motives among