Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/502

496 " nation and the mode of producing any other product of cultivation? Clearly there is none at all.

It is surprising, then, that the survival of the fittest, merely because it is a law of nature, should for that reason be supposed to militate against the efforts of man in behalf of peace—national, industrial and social. For if it were not a law of nature that the fittest survive, how could we expect to affect the development of an individual or of a nation by the improvement of circumstances? It would be hopeless to expect any progressive results from our efforts directed to the improvement of conditions if these conditions bore no relation to the type of individual, institution or society that develops within them? It is just because we know that nature acts in accordance with this unfailing law that we may be confident of our ability to determine the fitness either of individual or nation by intelligently controlling the conditions of life. Instead of precluding our efforts at reform or peace the laws of nature, I repeat, reveal the conditions that make possible successful efforts in this direction. If this is true of natural laws in general it is of course true of the law of the survival of the fittest. Everything that nature has developed, everything that survives, proves by its survival that it is among the fittest. In early paleozoic times certain Crustacea and mollusks were the highest forms of life; in the mesozoic period huge lizards held sway, and in the miocene age the mastodon was lord of the earth. Why do not all these animals flourish now? It is merely because the "times have changed"; they are no longer the fittest. Have we not here the very secret of achieving progress? Change in conditions produces evolution. If we only change the conditions, then, so that the peaceful type of nation will be the fittest, the warring type will become as extinct as the megatherium or the dodo, and, for exactly the same reason, that is, it will no longer be fit to survive. May we not hope, then, that through the changes that must result from increased social intelligence the peaceful nations by becoming the fittest will take the place of the militant types just as the present flora and fauna of the earth have supplanted the forms of life that immediately preceded them.

In conclusion we may say that the prevalent doctrines that, since the survival of the fittest is a natural law under the operation of which the lower organisms and society have advanced to their present stage of development, we must therefore be careful not to hinder its operation, or seek to abrogate it, is false. Of course, as a matter of fact, nobody should try to "hinder" the operation of a natural law, or "encroach" upon it, and nobody with any knowledge of nature, and solicitous about the realization of ethical ends, would undertake to "abrogate" a natural law except in the sense of counteracting one natural force by another. All that we can do, all that anybody should try to do, is to take advantage of the existence of a natural law so to arrange