ple of natural
selection suggests a further reflexion. The process of natural
selection is a process which always tends to some end, because by it
some organisms are selected, and they are the organisms which are
fittest to live. By 'fittest' is of course meant that which is
best adapted to the environment, or, as it is simply a question of
survival, that which so fits the conditions of the environment that it
is able to survive. The canon of the principle of natural selection is
on the face of it relative. No one would say that the principle can be
interpreted as an absolute law for conduct, after the fashion of the
absolute laws laid down by the rationalist moralists; what is involved
is simply a gelation to one's surroundings. One must keep in touch
with them, one must adapt oneself to them, in order to live.

But I wish to point out that the principle is not only relative, but
that its relation is limited to certain features of the environment
which surrounds mankind, namely, to those features and those features
only which prevent organisms unsuited to the conditions of life from
surviving at all. The only way in which natural selection works is by
killing off rapidly or gradually the organisms which are not fitted to
obtain from the environment the means of life--that is to say, it
has to do with life only, with the continuance of life as a possible
material phenomenon. Given that the organisms are fit enough to
survive, given that their animal vitality is not diminished, a
question remains: what is the standard of worthy survival? and to that
question the process and principle of natural selection can give no
answer. To use the old distinction: even if it is able to account for
being, it can give no standard for wellbeing.

Now the environment of civilised man is a great deal larger in range
than those material phenomena which contribute to his nourishment and
thus to his existence as an animal organism. No doubt his first effort
is to maintain himself as an animal--that is the condition of all
his subsequent activity--but he seeks also to suit himself to an
environment which is wider and subtler than merely animal conditions
of life; to adapt himself to society, perhaps only as a member of it,
perhaps also as a leader or reformer; to adapt himself to the dominant
ideas of his time, absorbing them, perhaps also modifying them; to
adapt himself to a whole region of interests which may in our life be
built upon an