Page:The Function of Reason.pdf/14

 shall not exhaust our subject by the help of a neat little verbal phrase.

Yet, in despite of this warning to avoid a mere phrase, I will start with a preliminary definition of the function of Reason, a definition to be illustrated, distorted, and enlarged, as this discussion proceeds.

The function of Reason is to promote the art of life.

In the interpretation of this definition, I must at once join issue with the evolutionist fallacy suggested by the phrase “the survival of the fittest.” The fallacy does not consist in believing that in the struggle for existence the fittest to survive eliminate the less fit. The fact is obvious and stares us in the face. The fallacy is the belief that fitness for survival is identical with the best exemplification of the Art of Life.

In fact life itself is comparatively deficient in survival value. The art of persistence is to be dead. Only inorganic things persist for great lengths of time. A rock survives for eight hundred million years; whereas the limit for a tree is about a thousand years, for a man or an elephant about fifty or one hundred years, for a dog about twelve years, for an insect about one year. The problem set by the doctrine of evolution is to explain how complex organisms with such deficient survival power ever evolved. They certainly did not appear because they were better at that game than the rocks around them. It may be possible to explain “the origin of species” by the doctrine of the struggle for