Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/390

374 ethics in no slight measure for its vague generalities and empty declamations, and its playing with phrases, and to combat its lack of circumspection. The evolutionists have joined generally with the utilitarians, but they are not practical ethicists. They could hardly succeed in actually working with their principle in such a compass as Bentham worked with his.

We come now to consider what is the bearing of the Darwinian doctrine of the struggle for existence upon morals. The objection has been brought against this doctrine, in divers phrases and with a variety of statement, that it leads to extreme demoralization. It can not be denied that Darwin's designation of the principle discovered by him as the "struggle for existence" is not fortunate, and is a metaphor, indicating a conscious hostile contention between living beings, each seeking the other's destruction, that has no real existence as such. And it will not be disputed that Darwin has been led into errors similar to those embodied in the theory of Malthus; or that great mischief has been done by the use of the phrase "struggle for existence" by persons who have never learned the A B C of ethics, but have still believed themselves called to offer their crudities to the public. But those mistakes are not to be alleged against the principle as such.

The principle of the natural selection of those beings whose modifications best adapt them to the conditions of their life is in the first place only an expression of that which has been, not of that which is to be. It is a law of Nature, not of morals. We are subject to this natural law of organic life, just as we are subject to the law of gravitation, or of the persistence of force, wholly without regard to our will. Natural selection is an agent which has operated as the general regulator of life upon the actual constitution of what is now existing in the organic world. It is the universal natural force that also regulates human life. And what do we see in human life? A fearful amount of moral and physical evil which is not prevented, but rather in part begotten by that regulator. We make it our task to contend incessantly by our premeditated action against that evil, while we regard the world, which is here without our assistance, not as the best possible, but as something which we must labor to improve and make more rational. What happens through the operation of the universal forces of Nature can not be a moral rule for us; for those forces produce also everything that is bad. This regulating principle implies that the being which possesses the most advantageous constitution, that is, which is best adapted to the conditions of its existence, has the best chances to maintain itself and to increase; and it applies to human beings as to all others. The fittest, or best adapted, survive. We have to distinguish among the life-conditions of man, or in his environment, between the physical and the social factors; the former regulating in general his physical, the latter his moral constitution.

What, now, is the moral constitution which enables the individual