h the hope that "good becomes the final goal of ill,"
we can no longer fancy that imperfection serves any secondary
purpose in the economy of the universe. A process by which evil
_becomes_ good is unintelligible as the action of a truly infinite
power which can attain its end without a process; it is absurd to
ascribe imperfection as a secondary result to a power which can
attain all its aims _without_ evil. Hence the world process, and
the intelligent purpose we fancy we detect in it must be
illusory.... God can have no purpose, and the world cannot be in
process.... If the world is the product of an infinite power it is
utterly unknowable, because its process and its nature would be
alike unnecessary and unaccountable. (_Riddles of the Sphinx_; pp.
318-19).

Besides, as I have already pointed out, in the process as it meets us in
nature there is not a selection for preservation, but a selection for
killing. With the breeder preservation is primary. It is of no value to
him to kill, it is the preservation of a desired type that is all
important. In nature, so far as we can see, the whole aim is to destroy.
It is not the fittest that are preserved so much as it is the unfittest
that are killed. The fittest are left alive for no other apparent reason
than that nature is unable to kill them. The truth of this is seen in
the fact that where there is no death there is no evolution of a
"higher" type. In the case of diseases that kill there is a gradual
development of an immune type--which introduces the paradox that the
healthiest diseases from which a race may suffer are those that are most
deadly. Where a disease does not kill there is no development against
it. It is the winnowing fan of death that makes for the development of
animal life. And the correct picture of nature--if we must picture an
intelligence behind it--would be that of an intelligence aiming at
killing all, and only failing in its purpose because the natural
endowment of some placed them beyond its power.

And, without examining the question begging word "higher," it may be
said that natural selection does not make for the uniform covering of
the earth with representatives of higher types. If in some parts of the
world the higher have replaced the lower types, elsewhere the lower have
replaced the higher. Natural selection, in fact, works without reference
to whether the form which survives