MATTHEW Arnold, in a well -remembered line,
describes a bird in Kensington Gardens "deep in its unknown day's
employ." But, peace to the poet, its employ is all too certain. Its
day is spent in struggling to get a living; and a very hard day it is.
It awoke at daybreak and set out to catch its morning meal; but another
bird was awake before it, and it lost its chance. With fifty other breakfastless
birds, it had to bide its time, to scour the country; to prospect the trees,
the grass, the ground; to lie in ambush; to attack and be defeated; to
hope and be forestalled. At every meal the same programme is gone through,
and every day. As the seasons change the pressure becomes more keen. Its
supplies are exhausted, and it has to take wing for hundreds and thousands
of miles to find new hunting-ground. This is how birds live, and this is
how birds are made. They are the children of Struggle. Beak and limb, claw
and wing, shape, strength, all down to the last detail, are the expressions
of their mode of life.
This is how the early savage lived, and this
is how he was made. The first practical problem in the Ascent of Man was
to get him started on his upward path. It was not enough for Nature to
equip him with a body, and plant his foot on the lowest rung of the ladder.
She must introduce into her economy some great principle which should secure,
not for him alone but for every living thing, that they should work upward
toward the top. The inertia of things is such that without compulsion they
will never move. And so admirably has this compulsion been applied that
its forces are hidden in the very nature of life itself--the very act of
living contains within it the principles of progress. An animal cannot
be without becoming.
The first great principle into the hands
of which this mighty charge was given is the Struggle for Life. It is one
of the chief keys for unlocking the mystery of Man's Ascent, and so important
in all development that Mr. Darwin assigns it the supreme rank among the
factors in Evolution. "Unless," he says "it be thoroughly
engrained in the mind, the whole economy of Nature, with every fact on
distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly
seen or quite misunderstood." How, under the pressures of this great
necessity to work for a living, the Ascent of Man has gone on, we have
now to inquire. Though not to the extent that is usually supposed, yet
in part under this stimulus, he has slowly emerged from the brute-existence,
and, entering a path where the possibilities of development are infinite,
has been pushed on from stage to stage, without premeditation, or design,
or thought on his part, until he arrived at that further height where,
to the unconscious compulsions of a lower environment, there were added
those high incitements of conscious ideals which completed the work of
creating him a Man.
Start with a comparatively unevolved savage,
and see what the Struggle for Life will do for him. When we meet him first
he is sitting, we shall suppose, in the sun. Let us also suppose--and it
requires no imagination to suppose it--that he has no wish to do anything
else than sit in the sun, and that he is perfectly contented, and perfectly
happy. Nature around him, visible and invisible, is as still as he is,
as inert apparently, as unconcerned. Neither molests the other; they have
no connection with each other. Yet it is not so. That savage is the victim
of a conspiracy. Nature has designs upon him, wants to do something to
him. That something is to move him. Why does it wish to move him? Because
movement is work, and work is exercise, and exercise may mean a further
evolution of the part of him that is exercised. How does it set about moving
him? By moving itself. Everything else being in motion, it is impossible
for him to resist. The sun moves away to the west and he must move or freeze
with cold. As the sun continues to move, twilight falls and wild animals
move from their lairs and he must move or be eaten. The food he ate in
the morning has dissolved and moved away to nourish the cells of his body,
and more food must soon be moved to take its place or he must starve. So
he starts up, he works, he seeks food, shelter, safety; and those movements
make marks in his body, brace muscles, stimulate nerves, quicken intelligence,
create habits, and he becomes more able and more willing to repeat these
movements and so becomes a stronger and a higher man. Multiply these movements
and you multiply him. Make him do things he has never done before, and
he will become what he never was before. Let the earth move round in its
orbit till the sun is far away and the winter snows begin to fall. He must
either move away, and move away very fast, to find the sun again; or he
must chase, and also very fast, some thick-furred animal, and kill it,
and clothe himself with its skin. Thus from a man he has become a hunter,
a different kind of a man, a further man. He did not wish to become a hunter;
he had to become a hunter. All that he wished was to sit in the
sun and be let alone, and but for a Nature around him which would not rest,
or let him alone, he would have sat on there till he died. The universe
has to be so ordered that that which Man would not have done alone he should
be compelled to do. In other words it was necessary to introduce into Nature,
and into Human Nature, some such principle as the Struggle for Life. For
the first law of Evolution is simply the first law of motion. "Every
body continues in a state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line,
unless it is compelled by impressed forces to change that state."
Nature supplied that savage with the impressed forces, with something which
he was compelled to respond to. Without that, he would have continued for
ever as he was.
Apart from the initial appetite, Hunger,
the stimulus of Environment--that which necessitates Man to struggle for
life--is two-fold. The first is inorganic nature, including heat and cold,
climate and weather, earth, air, water--the material world. The second
is the world of life, comprehending all plants and animals, and especially
those animals against whom primitive Man has always to struggle most--other
primitive Men. All that Man is, all the arts of life, all the gifts of
civilization, all the happiness and joy and progress of the world, owe
much of their existence to that double war.
Follow it a little further. Go back to a
time when Man was just emerging from the purely animal state, when he was
in the condition described by Mr. Darwin, "a tailed quadruped probably
arboreal in its habits," and when in his glimmering consciousness
mind was feeling about for its first uses in snatching some novel success
in the Struggle for Life. This hypothetical creature, so far as bodily
structure was concerned, was presumably not very vigorous. Had he been
more vigorous he might never have evolved at all; as it was, he fled for
refuge not to his body but to a stratagem of the Mind. When threatened
by a comrade, or pressed by an alien-species, he called in a simple foreign
aid to help him in the Struggle--the branch of a tree. Whether the discovery
was an accident; whether the idea was caught from the falling of a bough,
or a blow from a branch waving in the wind, is of no consequence. This
broken branch became the first weapon. It was the father of all
clubs. The day this discovery was made, the Struggle for Life took
a new departure. Hitherto animals fought with some specialized part of
their own bodies--tooth, limb, claw. Now they took possession of the armoury
of material Nature.
This invention of the club was soon followed
by another change. To use a club effectively, or to keep a good look-out
for enemies or for food, a man must stand erect. This alters the centre
of gravity of the body, and as the act becomes a habit, subsidiary changes
slowly take place in other parts. In time the erect position becomes confirmed.
Man owes what Burns calls his "heaven-erected face" to the Struggle
for Life. How recent this change is, how new the attitude still is to him,
is seen from the simple fact that even yet he has not attained the power
of retaining the erect position long. Most men sit down when they can,
and so unnatural is the standing position, so unstable the equilibrium,
that when slightly sick or faint, Man cannot stand at all.
Possibly both the erect position and the
Club had another origin, but the detail is immaterial. This "hairy-tailed
quadruped, arboreal in its habits," must sometimes have wandered or
been driven into places where trees were few and far between. It is conceivable
that an animal, accustomed to get along mainly by grasping something, should
have picked up a branch and held it in its hand, partly to use as a crutch,
partly as a weapon, and partly to raise itself from the ground in order
to keep a better look-out in crossing treeless spaces. An Orang-outang
may now be seen in the Zoological gardens in Java which promenades about
its bower continually with the help of a stick, and seems to prefer the
erect position so long as the stick or any support is at hand.
The next stage after the invention of anything
is to improve upon it, or to make a further use of it. Both these things
now happened. One day the stick, wrenched rapidly from the tree, happened
to be left with a jagged end. The properties of the point were discovered.
Now there were two classes of weapons in the world--the blunt stick and
the pointed stick--that is to say, the Club and the Spear.
In using these weapons at first, neither
probably was allowed to leave the hand. But already their owners had learned
to hurl down branches from the tree-tops and bombard their enemies with
nuts and fruits. Hence they came to throw their clubs and spears, and so
missiles were introduced. Under this new use the primitive weapons
themselves received a further specialization. From the heavy bludgeon would
arise on the one hand the shaped war-club, and on the other the short throwing
club, or waddy. The spear would pass into the throwing assegai, or the
ponderous weapon such as the South Sea Islanders use to-day. From the natural
point of a torn branch to the sharpening of a point deliberately is the
next improvement. From rubbing the point against the sharp edge of a large
stone, to picking up a sharp-edged small stone and using it as a knife,
is but a step. So, by the mere necessities of the Struggle for Life, development
went on. Man became a tool-using animal, and the foundations of the Arts
were laid. Next, the man who threw his missile furthest, had the best chance
in the Struggle for Life. To throw to still greater distances, and with
greater precision, he sought out mechanical aids--the bow, the boomerang,
the throwing-stick, and the sling. Then instead of using his own strength
he borrowed strength from nature, mixed different kinds of dust together
and invented gunpowder. All our modern weapons of precision, from the rifle
to the long range gun, are evolutions from the missiles of the savage.
These suggestions are not mere fancies; in savage tribes existing in the
world to-day these different stages in Evolution may still be seen.
After weapons of offence came weapons of
defence. At first the fighting savage sheltered himself at the back of
a tree. Then when he wished to pass to another tree he tore off part of
the bark, took it with him, and made the first shield. Where the trees
were without suitable bark, he would plait his shield from canes, grasses,
and the midribs of the leaves, or construct them from frameworks of wood
and skins. In times of peace these hollow shields, lying idly about the
huts, would find new uses--baskets, cradles, and, in an evolved form, coracles
or boats. In leisure hours also, new virtues discovered themselves in the
earlier implements of war and of the chase. The twang of his bow suggested
memories that were pleasant to his ear; he kept on twanging it, and so
made music. Because two bows twanged better than one, he twanged
two bows; then he made himself a two-stringed bow from the first, and ended
with a "ten-stringed instrument." By and by came the harp; later,
the violin. The whistling of the wind in a hollow reed prepared the way
for the flute; a conch-shell, broken at the helix, gave him the trumpet.
Two flints struck together yielded fire.
Trifling, almost puerile, as these beginnings
look to us now, remember they were once the serious realities of life.
The club and spear of the savage are toys to us to-day; but we forget that
the rude shafts of wood which adorn our halls were all the world to early
Man, and represented the highest expression and daily instrument of his
evolution. These primitive weapons are the pathetic expression of the world's
first Struggle. As the earliest contribution of mankind to solve its still
fundamental difficulty --the problem of Nutrition--they are of enduring
interest to the human race. So far from being, as one might suppose, mere
implements of destruction, they are implements of self-preservation; they
entered the world not from hate of Man but for love of life. Why was the
spear invented, and the sling, and the bow? In the first instance because
Man needed the bird and the deer for food. Why from implements of the chase
did they change into implements of war? Because other men wanted the bird
and the deer, and the first possessor, as populations multiplied, must
protect his food-supply. The parent of all industries is Hunger: the creator
of civilization in its earlier forms is the Struggle for Life.
By hollowing a pit in the ground, planting
his spear, or a pointed stake, upright in the centre, and covering the
mouth with boughs, Man could trap even the largest game. When the climate
became cold, he stripped off the skin and became the possessor of clothes.
With a stone for a hammer, he broke open molluscs on the shore, or speared
or trapped the fish in the shoals. Digging for roots with his pointed stick
in time suggested agriculture. From imitating the way wild fruits and grains
were sown by Nature he became a gardener and grew crops. To possess a crop
means to possess an estate, and to possess an estate is to give up wandering
and begin that more settled life in which all the arts of industry must
increase. Catching the young of wild animals and keeping them, first as
playthings, then for supplies of meat or milk, or in the case of the dog
for helping in the chase, he perceived the value of domestic animals. So
Man slowly passed from the animal to the savage, so his mind was tamed,
and strengthened, and brightened, and heightened; so the sense of power
grew strong, and so virtus, which is to say virtue, was born.
In struggling with Nature, early Man not
only found material satisfactions: he found himself. It was this
that made him, body, mind, character, and disposition; and it was this
largely that gave to the world different kinds of men, different kinds
of bodies, minds, characters, and dispositions. The first moral and intellectual
diversifiers of men are to be sought for in geography and geology--in the
factors which determine the circumstances in which men severally conduct
their Struggle for Life. If the land had been all the same the Struggle
for Life had been all the same, and if the Struggle for Life had been all
the same, life itself had been all the same. But to no two sets of men
is the world ever quite the same. The theatre of struggle varies with every
degree of latitude, with every change of altitude, with every variation
of soil. In most countries three separate regions are found--a maritime
region, an agricultural region, a pastoral region. In the first, the belt
along the shore, the people are fishermen; in the second, the lowlands
and alluvial plains, the people are farmers; in the third, the highlands
and plateaux, they are shepherds. As men are nothing but expressions of
their environments, as the kind of life depends on how men get their living,
each set of men becomes changed in different ways. The fisherman's life
is a precarious life; he becomes hardy, resolute, self-reliant. The farmer's
life is a settled life; he becomes tame, he loves home, he feeds on grains
and fruits which take the heat out of his blood and make him domestic and
quiet. The shepherd is a wanderer; he is much alone; the monotonies of
grass make him dull and moody; the mountains awe him: the protector of
his flock, he is a man of war. So arise types of men, types of industries;
and by and bye, by exogamous marriage, blends of these types, and further
blends of infinite variety. "It is so ordered by Nature, that by so
striving to live they develop their physical structure; they obtain faint
glimmerings of reason; they think and deliberate; they become Man. In the
same way, the primeval men have no other object than to keep the clan alive.
It is so ordered by Nature that in striving to preserve the existence of
the clan, they not only acquire the arts of agriculture, domestication,
and navigation; they not only discover fire, and its uses in cooking, in
war, and in metallurgy; they not only detect the hidden properties of plants,
and apply them to save their own lives from disease, and to destroy their
enemies in battle; they not only learn to manipulate Nature and to distribute
water by machinery; but they also, by means of the life-long battle, are
developed into moral beings. Nature being "everything that is,"
and Man being in every direction immersed in it and dependent on it, can
never escape its continuous discipline. Some environment there must always
be; and some change of environment, no matter how minute, there must always
be; and some change, no matter how imperceptible, must be always wrought
in him.
We now see, perhaps, more clearly why Evolution
at the dawn of life entered into league with so strange an ally as Want.
The Evolution of Mankind was too great a thing to entrust to any uncertain
hand. The advantage of attaching human progress to the Struggle for Life
is that you can always depend upon it. Hunger never fails. All other human
appetites have their periods of activity and stagnation; passions wax and
wane; emotions are casual and capricious. But the continuous discharge
of the function of Nutrition is interrupted only by the final interruption--Death.
Death means, in fact, little more than an interference with the function
of Nutrition; it means that the Struggle for Life having broken down, there
can be no more life, no further evolution. Hence, it has been ordained
that Life and Struggle, Health and Struggle, Growth and Struggle, Progress
and Struggle, shall be linked together; that whatever the chances of misdirection,
the apparent losses, the mysterious accompaniments of strife and pain,
the Ascent of Man should be bound up with living. When it is remembered
that, at a later day, Morality and Struggle, and even Religion and Struggle,
are bound so closely that it is impossible to conceive of them apart, the
tremendous value of this principle and the necessity for providing it with
indestructible foundations, will be perceived.
This association of the Struggle for Life
with the physiological function of Nutrition must be continually borne
in mind. For the essential nature of the principle has been greatly obscured
by the very name which Mr. Darwin gave to it. Probably no other was possible;
but the effect has been that men have emphasized the almost ethical substantive
`Struggle' and ignored the biological term `Life.' A secondary implication
of the process has thus been elevated into the prime one; and this, exaggerated
by the imagination, has led to Nature being conceived of as a vast murderous
machine for the annihilation of the majority and the survival of the few.
But the Struggle for Life, in the first instance, is simply living itself;
at the best, it is living under a healthily normal maximum of pressure;
at the worst, under an abnormal maximum. As we have seen, initially, it
is but another name for the discharge of the supreme physiological function
of Nutrition. If life is to go on at all, this function must be discharged
and continuously discharged. The primary characteristic of protoplasm,
the physical basis of all life, is Hunger, and this has dictated the first
law of being--"Thou shalt eat." What distinguishes scientifically
the organic from the inorganic, the animal from the stone? That the animal
eats, the stone does not. Almost all achievement in the early history of
the living world has been due to Hunger. For millenniums nearly the whole
task of Evolution was to perfect the means of satisfying it, and in so
doing to perfect life itself. The lowest forms of life are little more
than animated stomachs, and in higher groups the nutritive system is the
first to be developed, the first to function, and the last to cease its
work. Almost wholly, indeed, in the earlier vicissitude of the race, and
largely in the more ordered course of later times, Hunger rules the life
and work and destiny of men; and so profoundly does this mysterious deity
still dominate the round of even the highest life that the noblest occupations
which engage the human mind must be interrupted two or three times a day
to do it homage.
Whatever Man came ultimately to wish and
to achieve for himself, it was essential at first that such arrangements
should be made for him. The machinery for his development had not only
to be put into Nature, but he had to be placed in the machine and held
there, and brought back there as often as he tried to evade it. To say
that man evolved himself, nevertheless, is as absurd as to say that a newspaper
prints itself. To say even that the machinery evolved him is as preposterous
as to say of a poem that the printing-press made it. The ultimate problem
is, Who made the machine? and Who thought the poem that was to be printed?
If you say that you do not unreservedly approve
of the machine, that it lacerates as well as binds, the difficulty is more
real. But it is a principle in the study of history to suspend judgment
both of the meaning and of the value of a policy until the chain of sequences
it sets in motion should be worked out to its last fulfilment. When the
full tale of the Struggle for Life is told, when the record of its victories
is closed, when the balance of its gains and losses has been struck, and
especially when it is proved that there actually have been losses, it will
be time to pass judgment on its moral value. Of course this principle cuts
both ways; it warns off a favourable as well as an unfavourable verdict
on the beneficence of the system of things. But Evolution is a study in
history, and its results are largely known. And it would be affectation
to deny that on the whole these results are good, and appear the worthier
the more we penetrate into their inner meaning. Men forget when they denounce
the Struggle for Life, that it is to be judged not only on the ground of
sentiment but of reason, that not its local or surface effects only, but
its permanent influence on the order of the world, must be taken into account.
Even on the lower ranges of Nature the unfavourable
implications of the Struggle for Life have probably been exaggerated. While
it is essential to an understanding of the course of evolution to retain
in the imagination a vivid sense of the Struggle itself, we must beware
of over-colouring the representation, or flooding it with accompaniments
of emotion borrowed from our own sensations. The word Struggle at all in
this connection is little more than a metaphor. When it is said that an
animal struggles, all that is really meant is that it lives. An animal,
that is to say, does not, in addition to all its other activities, have
to employ a vast number of special activities, to the exercise of which
the term Struggle is to be applied. It is Life itself which is the Struggle:
and the whole Life, and the whole of the activities and powers which make
up Life are involved in it. To speak of Struggle in the sense of some special
and separate struggle, to conceive of battle, or even a series of battles,
is misleading, where all is struggle and where all is battle. Especially
must we beware of reading into it our personal ideas with regard to accompaniments
of pain. The probabilities are that the Struggle for Life in the lower
creation is, to say the least, less painful than it looks. Whether we regard
the dulness of the states of consciousness among lower animals, or the
fact that the condition of danger must become habitual, or that death when
it comes is sudden, and unaccompanied by that anticipation which gives
it its chief dread to Man, we must assume that whatever the Struggle for
Life subjectively means to the lower animals, it can never approach in
terror what it means to us. And as to putting any moral content into it,
until a late stage in the world's development, that is not to be thought
of. Judged of even by later standards there is much to relieve one's first
unfavourable impression. With exceptions, the fight is a fair fight. As
a rule there is no hate in it, but only Hunger. It is seldom prolonged,
and seldom wanton. As to the manner of death, it is generally sudden. As
to the fact of death, all animals must die. As to the meaning of an existence
prematurely closed, it is better to be to be eaten than not to be at all.
And, as to the last result, it is better to be eaten out of the world and,
dying, help another to live, than pollute the world by lingering decay.
The most, after all, that can be done with life is to give it to others.
Till Nature taught her creatures of their own free will to offer the sacrifice,
is it strange that she took it by force?
There are those indeed who frown upon Science
for predicating a Struggle for Life in Nature at all, lest the facts should
impugn the beneficence of the universe. But Science did not invent the
Struggle for Life. It is there. What Science has really done is to show
not only its meaning but its great moral purpose. There are others, again,
like Mill, who, seeing the facts, but not seeing that moral purpose, impugn
natural theology for still believing in the beneficence of that purpose.
Neither attitude, probably, is quite worthy of the names with which these
conclusions are associated. Much more reasonable are the verdicts of the
two men who are first responsible for bringing the facts before the world,
Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace and Mr. Darwin. "When we reflect,"
says Mr. Darwin, "on this struggle, we may console ourselves with
the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is
felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy,
and the happy survive and multiply." And in much stronger language
Mr. Wallace: "On the whole, the popular idea of the struggle for existence
entailing misery and pain on the animal world is the very reverse of the
truth. What it really brings about is the maximum of life and of the enjoyment
of life, with the minimum of suffering and pain. Given the necessity of
death and reproduction, and without these there could have been no progressive
development of the organic world--and it is difficult even to imagine a
system by which a greater balance of happiness could have been secured.
We may safely leave Nature here to look after
her own ethic. That a price, a price in pain, and assuredly sometimes a
very terrible price, has been paid for the evolution of the world, after
all is said, is certain. There may be difference of opinion as to the amount
of this price, but on one point there can be no dispute--that even at the
highest estimate the thing which was bought with it was none too dear.
For that thing was nothing less than the present progress of the world.
The Struggle for Life has been a victorious struggle; it has succeeded
in its stupendous task; and there is nothing of order or beauty or perfection
in living Nature that does not owe something to its having been carried
on. The first duty of those who demur to the cost of progress is to make
sure that they comprehend in all its richness the infinity of the gift
this sacrifice has purchased for humanity. The end of the Struggle for
Life is not battle; it is not even victory, it is evolution. The result
is not wounds, it is health. Nature is a vast and complicated system of
devices to keep things changing, adjusting, and, as it seems, progressing.
The Struggle for Life is a species of necessitated aspiration, the vis
a tergo which keeps living things in motion. It does not follow, of
course, that that motion should be upward; that is dependent on other considerations.
But the point to mark is, that without the struggle for food and the pressure
of want, without the conflict with foes and the challenge of climate, the
world would be left to stagnation. Change, adventure, temptation, vicissitude
even to the verge of calamity, these are the life of the world.
There is another side to this principle from
which its higher significance becomes still more apparent. It follows from
the Struggle for Life that those animals which struggle most successfully
will prosper, while the less successful will disappear--hence the well-known
principle of Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest. Waiving
the discussion of this law in general, and the. varying meanings which
"fitness" assumes as we rise in the scale of being, observe the
role it plays in Nature. The object of the Survival of the Fittest is to
produce fitness. And it does so both negatively and positively. In the
first place it produces fitness by killing off the unfit. Without the rigorous
weeding out of the imperfect the progress of the world had not been possible.
If fit and unfit indiscriminately had been allowed to live and reproduce
their kind, every improvement which any individual might acquire would
be degraded to the common level in the course of a few generations. Progress
can only start by one or two individuals shooting ahead of their species;
and their life-gain can only be conserved by their being shut off from
their species--or by their species being shut off from them. Unless shut
off from their species their acquisition will either be neutralized in
the course of time by the swamping effect of inter-breeding with the common
herd, or so diluted as to involve no real advance. The only chance for
Evolution, then, is either to carry off these improved editions into "physiological
isolation," or to remove the unimproved editions by wholesale death..
The first of these alternatives is only occasionally possible; the second
always. Hence the death of the unevolved, or of the unadapted in reference
to some new and higher relation with environment, is essential to the perpetuation
of a useful variation. Although Natural Selection by no means invariably
works in the direction of progress,--in parasites it has consummated almost
utter degeneration,--no progress can take place without it. It is only
when one considers the working of the Struggle for Life on the large scale,
and realizes its necessity to the Evolution of the world as a whole, that
one can even begin to discuss its ethical or teleological meanings. To
make a fit world, the unfit at every stage must be made to disappear; and
if any self-acting law can bring this about, though its bearing upon this
or that individual case may seem unjust, its necessity for the world as
a whole is vindicated. If more of any given species are born into the world
than can possibly find food, and if a given number must die, that number
must be singled out upon some principle; and we cannot quarrel with the
principle in Physical Nature which condemns to death the worst. By placing
the death-penalty upon the slightest shortcoming, Natural Selection so
discourages imperfection as practically to eliminate it from the world.
The fact that any given animal is alive at all is almost a token of its
perfectness. Nothing living can be wholly a failure. For the moment that
it fails, it ceases to live. Something more fit, were it even by a hairbreadth,
secures its place; so that all existing lives must, with reference to their
environment, be the best possible lives. Natural Selection is the means
employed in Nature to bring about perfect health, perfect wholeness, perfect
adaptation, and in the long run the Ascent of all living things.
This being so, the Law of the Struggle for
Life is elevated to a unique place in Nature as a first necessity of progress.
It involves that every living thing in Nature shall live its best, that
every resource shall be called out to its utmost, that every individual
faculty shall be kept in the most perfect order and work up to its fullest
strength. So far from being a drag on life, it is the one thing which not
only makes life go on at all, but which in the very act perfects it. The
result may sometimes involve the dethroning of a species, or its entire
extinction: it may lead in the case of others to degeneration; but in the
end it must result in the gradual perfecting of organisms upon the whole,
and the steady advance of the final type. In fixing the eye on the murderous
side of this Struggle, it is therefore well to remember to what it leads.
There could be no higher end in the universe than to make a perfect world,
and no more perfect law than that which at the same moment eliminates the
unfit and establishes the fit. Too frequently the moralist's attention
is diverted to the negative side, to what seems the quite immoral spectacle
of the massacre of the innocent, the rout and murder of the unfit. But
in earlier Nature there is no such word as innocent; and no ethical meaning
at that stage can attach itself to the term `unfit.' Fitness in the stormy
days of the world's animal youth was necessarily fighting-fitness; no higher
end was present anywhere than simply to gain for life a footing in the
world, and perfect it up to the highest physical form. The creature which
did that fulfilled its destiny, and no higher destiny was possible or conceivable.
The Survival of the Fittest, of course, does not mean the survival of the
strongest. It means the Survival of the Adapted--the survival of the most
fitted to the circumstances which surround it. A fish survives in water
when a leaking ironclad goes to the bottom, not because it is stronger
but because it is better adapted to the element in which it lives. A Texas
bull is stronger than a mosquito, but in an autumn drought the bull dies,
the mosquito lives. Fitness to survive is simply fittedness, and has nothing
to do with strength or courage, or intelligence or cunning as such, but
only with adjustments as fit or unfit to the world around. A prize-fighter
is stronger than a cripple; but in the environment of modern life the cripple
is cared for by the people, is judged fit to live by a moral world, while
the pugilist, handicapped by his very health, has to conduct his own struggle
for existence. Physical fitness here is actually a disqualification; what
was once unfitness is now fitness to survive. As we rise in the scale,
the physical fitness of the early world changes to fitness of a different
quality, and this law becomes the guardian of a moral order. In one era
the race is to the swift, in another the meek inherit the earth. In a material
world social survival depends on wealth, health, power; in a moral world
the fittest are the weak, the pitiable, the poor. Thus there comes a time
when this very law, in securing survival for those who would otherwise
sink and fall, is the minister of moral ends.
When we pass from the animal and the savage
states to watch the working of the Struggle for Life in later times, the
impression deepens that, after all, the "gladiatorial theory"
of existence has much to say for itself. To trace its progress further
is denied us for the present, but observe before we close what it connotes
in modern life. Its lineal descendants are two in number, and they have
but to be named to show the enormous place this factor has been given to
play in the world's destiny. The first is War, the second is Industry.
These in all their forms and ramifications are simply the primitive Struggle
continued on the social and political plane. War is not a casual thing
like a thunderstorm, nor a specific thing like a battle. It is that ancient
Struggle for Life carried over from the animal kingdom, which, in the later
as in the earlier world, has been so perfect an instrument of evolution.
Along with Industry, and for a time before it, War was the foster-mother
of civilization. The patron of the heroic virtues, the purifier of societies,
the solidifier of states, the military form of this Struggle--despite the
awful balance on the other side--stands out on every page of history as
the maker and educator of the human race. Industry is but the same Struggle
in another disguise. The industrial conflict of to-day is the old attempt
of primitive Man to get the most out of Nature--to grow foods, to find
clothes, to raise fuel, to gain wealth. Owing to the ever-increasing number
of the Strugglers the supplies fall short of the demands, with the result
of perpetuating on the industrial plane, and often in hard and degrading
forms, the primitive Struggle for Life. When society wonders at its labour
troubles it forgets that Industry is a stage but one or two removes from
the purely animal Struggle. And when morality impugns the Struggle for
Life, it forgets that nearly the whole later fabric of civilization is
its creation.
But one has only to look at these further
phases of the Struggle to observe the most important fact of all--the change
that passes over the principle as time goes on. Examine it on the higher
levels as carefully as we have examined it on the lower, and though the
crueler elements persist with fatal and appalling vigour, there are whole
regions, and daily enlarging regions, where every animal feature is discredited,
discouraged, or driven away. Already, with the social tragedy still at
its height around us, the amelioration in many directions makes constant
progress; and partly through the rise of opposing forces, and partly through
the very civilization which it has helped to create, the maligner power
must disappear. The Struggle for Life, as life's dynamic, can never wholly
cease. In the keenness of its energies, the splendour of its stimulus,
its bracing effect on character, its wholesome tensions throughout the
whole range of action, it must remain with us to the end. But in the virulence
of its animal qualities it must surely pass away. There are those who,
without reflecting on this qualitative change, would govern Society by
the merely animal Struggle; those who claim for this the sanction of Nature,
and lay down the principle of selfishness as the eternally working law.
The eternal law, as we shall presently see, is unselfishness. But even
the selfishness of early Nature loses its sting with time; the self that
is in it becomes a higher self; and the world in which it acts is so much
a better world that if self gave full rein to the animal it would be instantly
extinguished.
The amelioration of the Struggle for Life
is the most certain prophecy of Science. If this universe is a moral universe,
it was a necessity that sooner or later this conflict should abate, that
in the course of Evolution this particular change should come, that there
should be put into the very machinery of Nature that which should bring
it about. And what do we find? We find the Animal side of the Struggle
for Life attacked in such directions, and with such weapons, that its defeat
is sure. These weapons are in the armoury of Nature; they have been there
from the beginning; and they are now engaged upon the enemy so hotly and
so openly that we can discover what some of them are. The first is one
which has begun to mine the Struggle for Life at its roots. Essentially,
as we have seen, the Struggle for Life is the attempt to solve the fundamental
problem of all life--Nutrition. If that could be solved apart from the
Struggle for Life, its occupation would be gone. Now, it is more than probable
that that problem will be otherwise solved. It will be solved by science.
At the present moment Chemistry is devoting itself to the experiment of
manufacturing nutrition, and with an enthusiasm which only immediate
hope begets. It is not the visionaries who have dared to prophesy here.
In a hundred laboratories the problem is being practically worked out,
and, as one of the highest authorities assures us, "The time is not
far distant when the artificial preparation of articles of food will be
accomplished. Already, through the labours of other sciences, the Struggle
for Food has been made infinitely easier than it was; but when the immediate
quest succeeds, and the food of Man is made direct from the elements, the
Struggle in all its coarser forms will practically be abolished. Civilization
cannot ease the whole burden at once; the Struggle for Life will go on,
but it will be the Struggle with its fangs drawn.
But there is a higher hope than Science.
Attacked from below by Man's intellect, the final blow will be struck from
a deeper source. It is impossible to conceive that the Ascent of Man should
always depend upon his appetites, that in God's world there should be nothing
better to attract him than food and raiment, that he should take no single
step towards a higher life except when driven to it. As there comes a time
in a child's life when coercion gives place to free and conscious choice,
the day comes to the world when the aspirations of the spirit begin to
compete with, to neutralize, and to supplant the compulsions of the body.
Against that day, in the heart of humanity, Nature had made full provision.
For there, prepared by a profounder chemistry than that which was to relieve
the strain on the physical side, had gathered through the ages a force
in whose presence the energies of the Animal Struggle are as naught. Beside
the Struggle for the Life of Others the Struggle for Life is but
a passing phase. As old, as deeply sunk in Nature, this further force was
destined from the first to replace the Struggle for Life, and to build
a nobler superstructure on the foundations which it laid. To establish
these foundations was all that the Animal Struggle was ever designed to
do. It has laid them well; yet it is only when the Struggle for Life stands
projected against the larger influence with which all through history--and
in an infinitely profound sense through moral history --it has been allied,
that at once its worth and its ignominy are seen.