Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/608

590 Do these favorites of Fortune, it is asked, who take no part in the struggle for existence, constitute the portion of society which is most highly endowed by nature? Ought we to foster such a class for generations to come? In fact, can it be that its continued and prosperous existence has the highest justification?

Out of this preposterous condition of things, where the salutary principle of natural selection is borne down by artificial selection, our one hope of deliverance, we are told, is in the coming of a time "when all the millions who day by day come into existence shall enjoy equal rights of development, so that each individual favored of Fortune, be his birthplace a hovel or a palace, each one endowed with talent or genius, shall find ready prepared for him all the means requisite for developing his natural powers in proportion to their value, and for afterward employing the same for the common good."

I can not accept as correct this explanation of natural and artificial selection. Each individual has, throughout the whole course of historical development, fortified his existence by all the means at his command, with property, with inherited station, by putting forth all his powers of body or of mind, inherited and personal. Artificial selection has a definite end in view: it aims at transforming for a special purpose that which is offered by nature, and then maintaining the new form for the same end. When the nobility, the great landholder class, maintains its position and becomes rooted, we have not an instance of artificial selection in the Darwinian sense, but it is the natural course of things, however unnatural the result may seem to be. If this be not admitted, then the whole education of mankind, and every arrangement in the state or in society made consciously and with the object of adding to man's happiness or developing his powers, must be accounted instruments of artificial selection. And among the most artificial of them all would be a regulation of the state which should insure unlimited freedom of development to each individual's talents.

At our point of view we are ever and again reminded that the idea of the natural struggle for existence does not imply that the victorious one is always physiologically, or, in the case of man, morally, the most deserving. We might, but we can not, imagine an ideal state wherein the most deserving shall always gain the victory, and thus we may represent to ourselves a universal perfectionment as the end of development. Hence we are not in the least pessimists; but, on the other hand, the innumerable evidences of progress which we see in nature, both animate and inanimate, do not suffice to make our idea of the universe purely optimistic. Progress is an asymptote of the ideal of perfectionment, and in recognizing this we give free play to the tendency perfectionward, without attempting on our own part to interfere.

With all the certainty that is attainable by inductive proof, the doctrine of development teaches the brute origin of man. Whether Pfeffel says aright—