fittest may have
survived. There is no guarantee that they are the best. The continual
struggle against our fellows poisons our higher life. It will hardly do
to say with Huxley that the ethical struggle is the reverse of the
cosmical process. Nevertheless, we have here a most interesting
transformation in thought.

These ideas and principles, as is well known, were elaborated and
advanced upon in a very popular book, Drummond's _Ascent of Man_, 1894.
Even the title was a happy and suggestive one. Struggle for life is a
fact, but it is not the whole fact. It is balanced by the struggle for
the life of others. This latter reaches far down into the levels of what
we call brute life. Its divinest reach is only the fulfilment of the
real nature of humanity. It is the living with men which develops the
moral in man. The prolongation of infancy in the higher species has had
to do with the development of moral nature. So only that we hold a
sufficiently deep view of reason, provided we see clearly that reason
transforms, perfects, makes new what we inherit from the beast, we need
not fear for morality, though it should universally be taught that
morality came into being by the slow and gradual fashioning of brute
impulse.

Benjamin Kidd in his _Social Evolution_, 1895, has reverted again to
extreme Darwinism in morals and sociology. The law is that of unceasing
struggle. Reason does not teach us to moderate the struggle. It but
sharpens the conflict. All religions are praeter-rational, Christianity
most of all, in being the most altruistic. Kidd, not without reason,
comments bitterly upon Spencer's Utopia, the passage of militarism into
industrialism. The struggle in industrialism is fiercer than ever.
Reason affects the animal nature of man for the worse. Clearly conscious
of what he is doing, man objects to sacrificing himself for his family
or tribe. Instinct might lead an ape to do that. Intelligence warns a
man against it. Reason is cruel beyond anything dreamed of in the beast.
That portion of the community which loves to hear the abuse of reason,
rejoiced to hear this phrase. They rejoiced when they heard that
religion was the only remedy, and that religion was ultra-rational,
contra-rational, supernatural, in this new sense. How one comes by it,
or how one can rationally justify the yielding of allegiance to it, is
not clear. One must indeed have the will to believe if one believes on
these terms.

These again are