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 soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states—and here we are. Human civilization is but the van, the hither terminus, of an evolutional process which had its beginning away back in the protoplasm of primeval slime. The philosopher is the remote posterity of the meek and lowly monad.

Now, this whole enterprise, this entire process of biological evolution, has been accomplished by the survival from age to age of the fittest to survive; that is, by the subjection and elimination of the weak and the simple by the more powerful and sophisticated. And the disposition to exploit manifested by every animal that breathes, from philosopher to fish, is a disposition which has been implanted in the natures of living-beings by the necessities of evolution. The great task of reforming the universe, therefore, is the task of eliminating from the natures of its inhabitants the disposition to be inhospitable,