Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/86

82 tends that to add artificial advantage to natural superiority is fatal, because superiority can not be maintained unless the herd, as well as the superior individual, is carefully looked after and improved. The superiority that achieves leadership and domination is usually the power to do some particular thing exceptionally well. It is extreme individuation, and it often is purchased at the cost of race vitality. It is as necessary to maintain the one as to develop the other. Mr. Pearson therefore finds the socialistic program not incompatible with continuing progress by selection and inheritance.

From this too brief account of the applications thus far made of Darwinian theory to the problems presented by social relationships, including human institutions, we may turn to the question of further scientific possibilities in this direction. It will have been noted that the theories reviewed are not as they now stand entirely consistent with one another, and that none of them carries explanation back to the actual beginnings and causes of group formation. Perhaps if we could more adequately account, in terms of the struggle for existence, for actual social origins, and for successive stages of social evolution, the various fragments of theory which we now possess would fall into orderly correlation.

Possibly also the most promising starting point for any new attempt to achieve these ends may be found in a careful scrutiny of what is involved in the struggle for existence itself. Close readers of "The Origin of Species" know that although Mr. Darwin, when employing the phrase "a struggle for existence," usually meant by it a struggle for subsistence, he uses it also to mean a struggle with the physical conditions of life, to which an organism that would survive must be or