End of the Working of Natural Selection upon Man.  Throwing off the Brute-Inheritance.

As regards the significance of Man’s position in the universe, this gradual elimination of strife is a fact of utterly unparalleled grandeur.  Words cannot do justice to such a fact.  It means that the wholesale destruction of life, which has heretofore characterized evolution ever since life began, and through which the higher forms of organic existence have been produced, must presently come to an end in the case of the chief of God’s creatures.  It means that the universal struggle for existence, having succeeded in bringing forth that consummate product of creative energy, the Human Soul, has done its work and will presently cease.  In the lower regions of organic life it must go on, but as a determining factor in the highest work of evolution it will disappear.

The action of natural selection upon Man has long since been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions.  For in all grades of civilization above the lowest, “there are so many kinds of superiorities which severally enable men to survive, notwithstanding accompanying inferiorities, that natural selection cannot by itself rectify any particular unfitness.”  In a race of inferior animals any maladjustment is quickly removed by natural selection, because, owing to the universal slaughter, the highest completeness of life possible to a given grade of organization is required for the mere maintenance of life.  But under the conditions surrounding human development it is otherwise.[14] There is a wide interval between the highest and lowest degrees of completeness of living that are compatible with maintenance of life.

Hence the wicked flourish.  Vice is but slowly eliminated, because mankind has so many other qualities, beside the bad ones, which enable it to subsist and achieve progress in spite of them, that natural selection—­which always works through death—­cannot come into play.  The improvement of civilized man goes on mainly through processes of direct adaptation.  The principle in accordance with which the gloved hand of the dandy becomes white and soft while the hand of the labouring man grows brown and tough is the main principle at work in the improvement of Humanity.  Our intellectual faculties, our passions and prejudices, our tastes and habits, become strengthened by use and weakened by disuse, just as the blacksmith’s arm grows strong and the horse turned out to pasture becomes unfit for work.  This law of use and disuse has been of immense importance throughout the whole evolution of organic life.  With Man it has come to be paramount.