tity must be weeded out.
Moreover, since they vary exceedingly in their type of organization,
it seemed reasonable to suppose that, of the competitors, those who
were innately fitted to make the best of the ever-changing
circumstances would outlive the rest. An appeal to the facts fully
bore out this hypothesis. It must not, indeed, be thought that all
the weeding out which goes on favours the fittest. Accidents will
always happen. On the whole, however, the type that is most at home
under the surrounding conditions, it may be because it is more complex,
or it may be because it is of simpler organization, survives the rest.

Now to survive is to survive to breed. If you live to eighty, and have
no children, you do not survive in the biological sense; whereas your
neighbour who died at forty may survive in a numerous progeny. Natural
selection is always in the last resort between individuals; because
individuals are alone competent to breed. At the same time, the reason
for the individual's survival may lie very largely outside him. Amongst
the bees, for instance, a non-working type of insect survives to breed
because the sterile workers do their duty by the hive. So, too, that
other social animal, man, carries on the race by means of some whom
others die childless in order to preserve. Nevertheless, breeding
being a strictly individual and personal affair, there is always a
risk lest a society, through spending its best too freely, end by
recruiting its numbers from those in whom the engrained capacity to
render social service is weakly developed. To rear a goodly family
must always be the first duty of unselfish people; for otherwise the
spirit of unselfishness can hardly be kept alive the world.

Enough about heredity as a condition of evolution. We return, with
a better chance of distinguishing them, to the consideration of the
special effects that it brings about. It was said just now that heredity
is the stiffening in human nature, a stiffening bound up with a more
or less considerable offset of plasticity. Now clearly it is in some
sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity
included, is handed on from its parents. Our business in this chapter,
however, is on the whole to put out of our thoughts this plastic side
of the inherited life-force. The more or less rigid, definite,
systematized characters--these form the hereditary factor, the race.
Now none of these are ever quite fixed. A certa