d. We must suppress the adjective _best_. This is simply a
persisting relic of that teleology which used to see in Nature and
history a premeditated goal to be reached by means of a process of
continuous amelioration or progress.

Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory of universal
evolution, has completely banished the notion of final causes from
modern scientific thought and from the interpretation of natural
phenomena. Evolution consists both of involution and dissolution. It
may be true, and indeed it is true, that by comparing the two extremes
of the path traversed by humanity we find that there has really been a
true progress, an improvement taking it all in all; but, in any case,
progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but, as Goethe has
said, a spiral with rhythms of progress and of retrogression, of
evolution and of dissolution.

Every cycle of evolution, in the individual life as in the collective
life, bears within it the germs of the corresponding cycle of
dissolution; and, inversely, the latter, by the decay of the form
already worn out, prepares in the eternal laboratory new evolutions and
new forms of life.

It is thus that in the world of human society every phase of
civilization bears within it and is constantly developing the germs of
its own dissolution from which issues a new phase of civilization--which
will be more or less different from its predecessor in geographical
situation and range--in the eternal rhythm of living humanity. The
ancient hieratic civilizations of the Orient decay, and through their
dissolution they give birth to the Graeco-Roman world, which in turn is
followed by the feudal and aristocratic civilization of Central Europe;
it also decays and disintegrates through its own excesses, like the
preceding civilizations, and it is replaced by the bourgeois
civilization which has reached its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon
world. But it is already experiencing the first tremors of the fever of
dissolution, while from its womb there emerges and is developing the
socialist civilization which will flourish over a vaster domain than
that of any of the civilizations which have preceded it.[20]

Hence it is not correct to assert that the natural selection caused by
the struggle for existence assures the survival of the _best_; in fact,
it assures the survival of the best _fitted_.

This is a very great difference, alike in natural Darwinism and in
soci