only which contribute to the efficiency of the individual, but
also qualities implying self-restraint and even self-sacrifice on the
part of one member of the group for the sake of other members of the
group or of the group as a whole. The habit of obedience, for example,
obedience to the authority of the group or its representative, may be
of fundamental importance in maintaining the existence of the group
as a group, although that habit of obedience has no place at all in
promoting the interests of the individual when he is competing with
other individuals.

Thirdly, there is still another kind of competition which is a little
more difficult to make quite clear, because it is not on the plane of
individual life and it is not to be identified with the life of
the community. It is a competition on the intellectual level, the
competition between ideas, and with this one may also couple (so far
as it does not directly concern the struggle for social existence and
thus belong to the second class) the competition between institutions,
including therein also habits and customs. The various institutions in
our national life, and the various habits of our life, may be said to
be forms which have to maintain themselves often in competition with
other and antagonistic forms of institution. The same holds of our
various ideas or general conceptions, whether about morality, which we
have now specially in view, or about matters more purely intellectual.
For instance, forty or fifty years ago, there was a fierce controversy
amongst biologists between the group of ideas represented by Darwin's
theory and the group of ideas represented by the traditional view of
the fixity of species. There was a long conflict between these two
groups of ideas, and we may now say that the Darwinian group of ideas
has emerged from the conflict victorious.

Now, when the phrase 'natural selection in morals' is used, the
reference is commonly to a conflict of this last kind. The suggestion
is that different ideas and also different standards of action are
manifested at the same time within the same community, that they
compete with one another for existence, and that gradually those which
are better adapted to the life of the community survive, while the
others grow weaker and in the end disappear. In this way the law of
natural selection is made to apply to moral ideas and moral standards,
and also to intellectual standards and to the institutions and