A NON-DUALISTIC VIEW OF NATURAL SELECTION.
With old-line evolutional ethics[1] the struggle for existence and natural selection made their way as recognized aids to the furtherment of accepted morality, and thus, by preserving the proper relations between altruism, and egoism, wayward man and his conscience, entered ethical theory under the protective coloring of ideas under control of a theology in process of extinction. The evolutional moralists, rid of theological encumbrances, were seeking to accomplish on a somewhat higher plane, and in a rarer atmosphere, what the reconcilers had striven for—the equation of new results with old truth. Identities were more evident than differences. The organism and its perfect structure seemed a more real and interesting thing than the individual, so perfectly fitted to the stupendous whole.
But it soon became evident that natural selection and the struggle for existence had been difficult incidents to manage, and that the outcome for man and his morality might have been far otherwise than had been suspected. In biology the growing tendency to restrict the recognized field of operation of natural selection only emphasized the contrasts between this so-called automatic principle and those intelligent or conscious modes of action by which evolution seemed guided in the sphere of human affairs. If these were rejected by the faithful evolutionist, a literal rendering of biological evolution into ethical terms showed nothing more valuable than mere life or existence as the outcome of human evolution, and thus emphasized only those individual or racial qualities which promote mere survival. As a result, we were left to a choice between the idealists' dualistic view of nature and 'selection,' and an equally dualistic but purely materialistic, individualistic, and egoistic ethic. Our question now concerns the nature of this dualistic conception of the foregoing concepts and the reason for its perpetuation.
- ↑ By which may be understood theories like those of Spencer and Alexander, which accept evolution not as a mere account of a process, but, by reference to natural selection, as a guide also.
