due to a process of deliberate selection or rejection of ideas.[1] Here victories in the domain of politics, science, or religion, are won by sheer intelligence acting with reference to preconceived ends. A new process supervenes upon or supplants natural selection, which is thus again termed by contrast 'blind' and 'mechanical.'
But it is an obviously futile proceeding—this effort to gauge the distance which separates a world in which purposive activity plays a part from a world in which natural selection is a controlling principle, by citing instances of purposive action or evidence that such instances abound. One case is as good as a million, since there is something to be accounted for if a veritable contrast exists between the 'higher' and the 'lower,' the purposive and the so-called 'mechanical.' If, however, natural selection is not a theory of causes but only of the effect of aggregated causes, the latter may be teleological or 'natural' as far as the principle is concerned. The only question is that which concerns quantitative determination, and this again matters not to the principle, which concerns itself with our convenience as little as it does with the causes of variation or the nature of the environment.
(3) It is generally admitted that natural selection does not account for the beginning of variations, and this check to its pretensions in the organic world is welcomed by the opponent of natural selection in morals. But if natural selection, in providing for the elimination of unsuitable characters, be a sine qua non of the establishment of the mean which fixes itself in the type or species, it is all-controlling, since its scope is not diminished whatever may be the principles we call to aid. The variations may be fortuitous, or due to a life-force, or consciously initiated, so far as natural selection is concerned, which is only a principle of adaptation through elimination. It is thus in merely a negative sense a principle of origin and growth, in so far as it provides a moving type or shifting average to which the individuals must within limits conform. If, however, it is not a positive principle which must be taken into account for the origin of variations, it is difficult to see why the recognition does not favor rather than hinder its application in morals.
- ↑ W. R. Sorley, Recent Tendencies in Ethics, p. 59.
