Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/435

421 secure them. If there is overcrowding, this is no affair of nature's. Ruling out all teleology, she has no predestined goal. She has no instinct for the type, nor does she bear special malice toward the individual. Adaptation, conformity to environment, are all that are required, and if in the process competition arise, and natural selection be brought into operation, this broad fact of conformity to environment is the general condition which brings into play the special selective principle. The plant or animal species is forced to be content with unfavorable soil or altitude through the pressure of hardier or better adapted rivals; its evolution is thereby conditioned and in time it may perish.

Natural selection presupposes, indeed, the struggle for existence, but the rival species are simply factors in the environment, conditioning through special groups of causes, which their presence introduces, the preservation or elimination of these variations. The 'prodigality of nature,' the overcrowding and the universality of competition, ought not to obscure the fact that the selective forces by which certain variations are eliminated is a natural selection and goes on in a way to which struggle, or competition, is incidental. If we look to the process of elimination by which nature 'selects' certain variations to the exclusion of others, natural selection is a general term for a multitude of causes operative in the environment. If we note the general fact of crowding, as a special condition under which the process of elimination occurs, it becomes a name for a more restricted and determinable group of causes due to the presence of rivals. When sexual selection, isolation, and other factors concerned in evolution are made subordinate to natural selection, the former use of the term seems to predominate. When the scope of natural selection is restricted with reference to other principles, it is used chiefly in the latter sense.

The apparent applicability of natural selection to morals has so frequently been pointed out that in a paper which treats rather of misconceptions than of opposing theories as a whole only the briefest mention seems necessary.

Obviously analogies exist in plenty. The prodigality of nature is ably seconded by man in the profusion of human ideas, theories,