e case of competition between individuals, at least among
civilised men, it is clear that natural selection is very far from
being the only factor. A man trains himself for a profession. It does
not just somehow come about that a number of people accidentally
develop certain varieties of occupation, and that natural selection
makes play with this result, cutting off the unfit and leaving only
those who are fairly well adapted to their positions. Something 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superseded by intelligent initiative and deliberate preparation.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