of this sort no doubt takes place to a limited extent; but, so far as it does take place, our methods are denounced as defective and, perhaps, as old-fashioned.  ‘Haphazard’ is a wasteful principle, and should be superseded by intelligent initiative and deliberate preparation.  And this indeed is the usual process.  One adapts oneself carefully and of set purpose to the conditions of one’s life, instead of simply waiting for natural selection to cut one off should one happen to be unfit.

Even among animals there are certain processes which cannot be brought under natural selection.  There are the first efforts, slight as they may be, towards learning by experience.  There are also all those facts which Darwin classes under sexual selection, where there is a positive choosing, due no doubt not to intelligent purpose but nevertheless to a subjective impulse.  This marks the beginning of the end of the reign of natural selection, because in it for the purely objective or external factor there is substituted an internal, subjective factor; instead of the process of cutting off unsuitable individuals among chance varieties there appears the process of selecting that variety which pleases or attracts.

The result of this whole investigation is that natural selection cannot be properly applied so as to explain the conflict of moral ideas.  It is not able to account for all the phenomena of the competition between groups.  Even in sub-human life there are indications of the processes which supersede natural selection.  From this result the ethical consequence may be drawn, that there is no good ground for taking the lower, the less developed, method of selection as our guide in preference to the higher and more developed.  Surely we are not to take natural selection as the sole factor of ethical import because we see it at the crude beginnings of life on this earth, while the process of life itself in its higher ranges passes beyond natural selection.  The physiological interpretation of life and conduct put forward by Nietzsche, and by a good many biological philosophers, would take natural selection, and its bearing upon the animal nature of man, as the sole test of efficiency and ethical value.  But this interpretation of man’s life disregards the achievements of evolution itself for the sake of pinning its faith to the humble beginnings of the organic process.

After this long enquiry into the nature and scope of natural selection, we should be better prepared to understand the degree and kind of ethical significance which can be rightly assigned to the theory of evolution.  In the first place let us consider the now familiar claim that man must be taken as part of the cosmos, and that man’s conduct must be regarded and studied in its place in the cosmic process.  At the time when it was first made this claim may have seemed a startling one; but I think that we must admit that, keeping to their own ground and using the instruments that are theirs by right, the evolutionist writers have succeeded in showing man’s connexion with the animal kingdom and with organic life generally, and thus his place in the whole cosmic process.  The claim must therefore be admitted.