< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
82
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

tends that to add artificial advantage to natural superiority is fatal, because superiority can not be maintained unless the herd, as well as the superior individual, is carefully looked after and improved. The superiority that achieves leadership and domination is usually the power to do some particular thing exceptionally well. It is extreme individuation, and it often is purchased at the cost of race vitality. It is as necessary to maintain the one as to develop the other. Mr. Pearson therefore finds the socialistic program not incompatible with continuing progress by selection and inheritance.[1]

"To 'wage war against natural inequality' is clearly a reductio ad absurdum of the socialistic doctrine. So far as I understand the views of the more active socialists of to-day, they fully recognize that the better posts, the more lucrative and comfortable berths, must always go to the more efficient and more productive workers, and that it is for the welfare of society that it should be so. Socialists, however, propose to limit within healthy bounds the rewards of natural superiority and the advantages of artificial inequality. The victory of the more capable, or the more fortunate, must not involve such a defeat of the less capable, or the less fortunate, that social stability is endangered by the misery produced. At the present time a failure of the harvest in Russia and America simultaneously, or a war with a first-class European power, would probably break up our social system altogether. We should be crushed in the extra-group struggle for existence, because we have given too much play to intra-group competition, because we have proceeded on the assumption that it is better to have a few prize cattle among innumerable lean kine than a decently-bred and properly-fed herd with no expectations at Smithfield."

From this too brief account of the applications thus far made of Darwinian theory to the problems presented by social relationships, including human institutions, we may turn to the question of further scientific possibilities in this direction. It will have been noted that the theories reviewed are not as they now stand entirely consistent with one another, and that none of them carries explanation back to the actual beginnings and causes of group formation. Perhaps if we could more adequately account, in terms of the struggle for existence, for actual social origins, and for successive stages of social evolution, the various fragments of theory which we now possess would fall into orderly correlation.

Possibly also the most promising starting point for any new attempt to achieve these ends may be found in a careful scrutiny of what is involved in the struggle for existence itself. Close readers of "The Origin of Species" know that although Mr. Darwin, when employing the phrase "a struggle for existence," usually meant by it a struggle for subsistence, he uses it also to mean a struggle with the physical conditions of life, to which an organism that would survive must be or

  1. ↑ "The Chances of Death," Vol. I., pp. 112, 113. In view of the apprehensions just now so freely expressed in England, it is, I think, worth while to quote the exact words in which Mr. Pearson more than ten years ago summarized his argument:
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.