e takes account of
the biographies not only of species, but also of individuals: it seeks
to find the law of development of the single individual.[205] As
Leibnitz said long ago, individuality consists in the law of the
changes of a being: "La loi du changement fait l'individualite de
chaque substance." Here is a world which is almost new for science,
which till now has mainly occupied itself with general laws and forms.
But these are ultimately only means to understand the individual
phenomena, in whose nature and history a manifold of laws and forms
always cooeperate. The importance of this remark will appear in the
sequel.

V

To many people the Darwinian theory of natural selection or struggle
for existence seemed to change the whole conception of life, and
particularly all the conditions on which the validity of ethical ideas
depends. If only that has persistence which can be adapted to a given
condition, what will then be the fate of our ideals, of our standards
of good and evil? Blind force seems to reign, and the only thing that
counts seems to be the most heedless use of power. Darwinism, it was
said, has proclaimed brutality. No other difference seems permanent
save that between the sound, powerful and happy on the one side, the
sick, feeble and unhappy on the other; and every attempt to alleviate
this difference seems to lead to general enervation. Some of those who
interpreted Darwinism in this manner felt an aesthetic delight in
contemplating the heedlessness and energy of the great struggle for
existence and anticipated the realisation of a higher human type as
the outcome of it: so Nietzsche and his followers. Others recognising
the same consequences in Darwinism regarded these as one of the
strongest objections against it; so Duehring and Kropotkin (in his
earlier works).

This interpretation of Darwinism was frequent in the interval between
the two main works of Darwin--_The Origin of Species_ and _The Descent
of Man_. But even during this interval it was evident to an attentive
reader that Darwin himself did not found his standard of good and evil
on the features of the life of nature he had emphasised so strongly.
He did not justify the ways along which nature reached its ends; he
only pointed them out. The "real" was not to him, as to Hegel, one
with the "rational." Darwin has, indeed, by his whole conception of
nature, rendered a great service to ethics in making the difference
between the li