ped by natural selection; because it is never
required or used by them. The singing of savages is a more or less
monotonous howling, and the females seldom sing at all. Savages
certainly never choose their wives for fine voices, but for rude health,
and strength, and physical beauty. Sexual selection could not therefore
have developed this wonderful power, which only comes into play among
civilized people. It seems as if the organ had been prepared in
anticipation of the future progress of man, since it contains latent
capacities which are useless to him in his earlier condition. The
delicate correlations of structure that give it such marvellous powers,
could not therefore have been acquired by means of natural selection.

_The Origin of some of Man's Mental Faculties, by the preservation of
Useful Variations, not possible._

Turning to the mind of man, we meet with many difficulties in attempting
to understand, how those mental faculties, which are especially human,
could have been acquired by the preservation of useful variations. At
first sight, it would seem that such feelings as those of abstract
justice and benevolence could never have been so acquired, because they
are incompatible with the law of the strongest, which is the essence of
natural selection. But this is, I think, an erroneous view, because we
must look, not to individuals but to societies; and justice and
benevolence, exercised towards members of the same tribe, would
certainly tend to strengthen that tribe, and give it a superiority over
another in which the right of the strongest prevailed, and where
consequently the weak and the sickly were left to perish, and the few
strong ruthlessly destroyed the many who were weaker.

But there is another class of human faculties that do not regard our
fellow men, and which cannot, therefore, be thus accounted for. Such are
the capacity to form ideal conceptions of space and time, of eternity
and infinity--the capacity for intense artistic feelings of pleasure, in
form, colour, and composition--and for those abstract notions of form
and number which render geometry and arithmetic possible. How were all
or any of these faculties first developed, when they could have been of
no possible use to man in his early stages of barbarism? How could
"natural selection," or survival of the fittest in the struggle for
existence, at all favour the development of mental powers so entirely
removed from the material neces