f
intensity, of breadth, of duration; not a difference of kind such as
would destroy all common measure. Life is something which we predicate
of the most diversely organized beings, and therefore would seem to be
something the same in all, which they secure in a diversity of ways.

Thus Darwin defines the general good or welfare which should be the aim
of our conduct as "the rearing of the greatest number of individuals in
full health and vigour with all their faculties perfect;" upon which Mr.
Sidgwick remarks[6] with justice: "Such a reduction of the notion of
'well-being' to 'being' (actual and potential) would be a most important
contribution from the doctrine of Evolution to ethical science. But it
at least conflicts in a very startling manner with those ordinary
notions of progress and development" in which "it is always implied that
certain forms of life are qualitatively superior to others,
independently of the number of individuals, present or future, in which
each form is realized.... And if we confine ourselves to human beings,
to whom alone the practical side of the doctrine applies, is it not too
paradoxical to assert that 'rising in the scale of existence' means no
more than 'developing the capacity to exist'? A greater degree of
fertility would thus become an excellence outweighing the finest moral
and intellectual endowments; and some semi-barbarous races must be held
to have attained the end of human existence more than some of the
pioneers and patterns of civilization." Nor is it only in the region of
ethics but in every region that this false simplification is fertile in
paradoxes; and yet if it be disowned, the charm to which Evolution owes
its popularity is gone.

It would be indeed a short cut to knowledge if we might believe life to
be, as this theory imagines it, a simple, self-diffusing force with an
irrepressible tendency to spread itself in all directions, like fire in
a prairie. True we should not have altogether got rid of innate
tendencies, but we should have reduced them to one, namely, to the
struggling, or persisting, or self-asserting tendency; a simplification
like that offered by the matter-and-force theory of Buchner.

This flame of life once kindled (we are told) endeavours to subdue all
things to itself, and all that we find in the way of variety of organic
structure and function has been shaped and determined by its
struggle--much as a river channels a way for its waters in virt