although their immediate value is realized as individual benefit.  Surely an organism that failed to live an efficient individual life would be ineffective in reproduction, so that from one point of view everything an animal does is tributary to the culminating act performed for the larger good of the life of the whole species.  It is a nice balance that nature has worked out in Amoeba, as well as in all other cases, between the personal life of the individual, complete only when the final process of multiplication supervenes, and this process itself, which demands an efficient performance, even though this is destructive of the performer.

Before passing to the next members of the series, which reveal additional principles more truly social in the human sense, let us pause to note that already we have found certain natural criteria that belong in the department of ethics.  Even in the case of the biological unit like Amoeba, which is entirely solitary and unrelated to other individuals of its kind excepting in so far as it is a link in the chain of successive generations, any vital activity can be called good or bad, right or wrong.  Nature judges an act good and right if it tends to preserve the animal and the species; an act is wrong and evil if it is biologically destructive of the animal or if it interferes with the perpetuation of its kind.  Again it must be pointed out that these terms are human words, employed for the complex conceptions that belong alone to retrospective and contemplative human consciousness to most of us they seem to imply the existence of some absolute standard or ideal by which a given act may be tested to see if it is right or the opposite.

If human ethics is truly unrelated to beginnings found in lower nature, something that has arisen by itself from supernature, then we must not use the terms in question except by way of analogy.  If, however, nature has been continuous in the working out of every department of human life and human thought through evolution, then the criteria of the righteousness of the acts performed even by an Amoeba may be found to be basic and fundamental for ethical systems of whatever human race or time.  This subject remains to be discussed in the final chapter, but it must be clear that we cannot survey the evolutionary process by which social systems have come into being without dealing at the same time with the origin and growth of ethical conduct as such.

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Without leaving the group of one-celled animals typified by Amoeba, we find colonies of the most elementary biological nature, where other natural obligations are added to the two of greatest importance.  Some species of the bell-animalcule, Vorticella, provide characteristic examples of these primitive compound protozoa.  Here the assemblage is made up of one-celled individuals essentially similar to one another in structure and in physiological activities;