Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/700

686 general significance of evolution, but also of the processes involved. Fitness for the struggle for existence no longer means the possession of mere strength or cunning, but just as truly, such qualities as prudence, temperance, fidelity, sympathy, self-sacrifice. Natural selection means, in the case of human beings, the selection of the fittest and best in an environment which shall conduce to the development of more nearly perfect types of life. Since we are not merely products of, but factors in, evolution, it should be the aim of our education and legislation to produce such an environment. If natural selection is to have fair play, all unearned increment should be turned over to the State for such purposes as education. The resulting superior environment would foster a less individualistic and more truly social type of character. Moreover, until we go much further in providing a healthy moral, mental, and physical environment, we should be cautious about replacing natural selection by the rigorous artificial selection advocated by eugenists. Lastly, we must recognize that the survival of the best types is not furthered, but hindered, by international war.

The various meanings with which Schopenhauer endows the Will fall into two classes. On the negative side, the Will is allied to the thing-in-itself or the Vedantic Absolute, and, like Spencer's Unknowable, forms the dark background of experience, inaccessible to the understanding. On the positive side, it is a power manifested in phenomena, an impetus toward the multiplication and individuation of entities and toward a struggle for survival among the modes of existence. It is with the Will in this second, concrete, and objectified sense that Schopenhauer is more characteristically concerned. The conception of the Will as an eternal striving or becoming might well have lent itself to an evolutionary development, but in his earlier period, we find that Schopenhauer, following his theory of the archetypal essences of phenomena, holds to the essential invariability of species. In Der Wille in der Natur, however, while criticizing certain theories of Lamarck, he affirms a belief in the origin of species from one another through descent, on the ground that the homologies manifested by the skeletal structure of various species demand such an hypothesis. In the treatise, Zur Philosophie und Wissenschaft der Natur, 1850, Schopenhauer develops a thorough-going evolutionism, the astronomical, geological, and biological features of which may be maijily traced to Laplace, Cuvier and Robert Chambers. A belief is here affirmed in the spontaneous generation of the lower species, in saltatory mutations among the higher, and in the simian descent of man. Certain comparisons may be made between the systems of Schopenhauer and Spencer. In the case of each, an essentially mystical and negative metaphysics forms the background for an evolutionary philosophy of nature. At the same time, Spencer's aim is to represent the whole evolutionary process in terms of the redistribution of matter and change in the direction of motion, while