Thirdly, there is still another kind of competition which is a little more difficult to make quite clear, because it is not on the plane of individual life and it is not to be identified with the life of the community.  It is a competition on the intellectual level, the competition between ideas, and with this one may also couple (so far as it does not directly concern the struggle for social existence and thus belong to the second class) the competition between institutions, including therein also habits and customs.  The various institutions in our national life, and the various habits of our life, may be said to be forms which have to maintain themselves often in competition with other and antagonistic forms of institution.  The same holds of our various ideas or general conceptions, whether about morality, which we have now specially in view, or about matters more purely intellectual.  For instance, forty or fifty years ago, there was a fierce controversy amongst biologists between the group of ideas represented by Darwin’s theory and the group of ideas represented by the traditional view of the fixity of species.  There was a long conflict between these two groups of ideas, and we may now say that the Darwinian group of ideas has emerged from the conflict victorious.

Now, when the phrase ‘natural selection in morals’ is used, the reference is commonly to a conflict of this last kind.  The suggestion is that different ideas and also different standards of action are manifested at the same time within the same community, that they compete with one another for existence, and that gradually those which are better adapted to the life of the community survive, while the others grow weaker and in the end disappear.  In this way the law of natural selection is made to apply to moral ideas and moral standards, and also to intellectual standards and to the institutions and customs in which our ideas are expressed.

These, then, are the three ways in which the competition in man’s life and the selection between the competing factors is carried out.  And sometimes I think one sees a tendency to suggest that this needs only to be stated, and that the whole question of the application of evolution to ethics is then settled.  You may say that such and such moral qualities, as for instance the quality of sympathy, do not aid the individual in competition with other individuals.  The reply might be No, but they aid the group in competition with other groups.  Or you may say, as Darwin said, that even this competition will not account for the civilised development of sympathy.  But even so we are not at the end of our tether; and we can fall back on the conflict of ideas.  The idea of sympathy or of altruism, for instance, may conflict with some other idea, such as that of egoism.  At first the competition is a group-competition, in which the group with altruistic members succeeds at the expense of the egoistic group.  By the victory