Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/445

431 to the continuance of society. In other words, it is conformity to the relatively complex rather than to the relatively simple environmental conditions which is favored by natural selection. Such conformity is secured by adjustments; these, in turn, favor life indirectly through the continuance of the functions which society provides for him as a member, functions without which mere organic instincts and corresponding activities of expression would, on this higher plane, be powerless to secure the end, namely, life, which evolution at lower animal levels seems alone directly to favor.

Admittedly, the more complex activities of individuals in modern civilized society, and progress—if there be progress—are dependent upon the integrity of basal instincts which members of the most complex society have in common with those of the simplest and most primitive. But the fact that such needs and instincts are basal to all mankind does not warrant the inference that natural selection directly favors only the continuance of those modes of reaction which satisfy them. At whatever level, the implications of natural selection are always utility, efficiency, fitness for survival because of adaptation, and through adaptation the preservation of a no-wise static mean. But all these conditions are relative to a changing dynamic environment quite other than that which interprets the end as life. We must say either that Life—another reified concept—means differently at different levels of evolution, or that life itself, as the mere continuance of organic processes in the individual, is an end which at higher stages of evolution can be secured only by forms of adjustment that favor primarily other ends than life. In misinterpretation of this relation Professor Sorley says: "Surely it is clear that it is only in the rarest cases that false or inadequate ideas ... have any tendency to shorten life or weaken health. Bishop Wilberforce was killed by a fall from his horse, not by the triumphant dialectic of Professor Huxley. Sir Richard Owen lived to a patriarchal old age, and did not disappear from the face of the earth because he clung to an idea which the best intellect of his time had relinquished. There is nothing in the doctrine of the fixity of the species—if you hold it