customs
in which our ideas are expressed.

These, then, are the three ways in which the competition in man's life
and the selection between the competing factors is carried out. And
sometimes I think one sees a tendency to suggest that this needs
only to be stated, and that the whole question of the application of
evolution to ethics is then settled. You may say that such and such
moral qualities, as for instance the quality of sympathy, do not aid
the individual in competition with other individuals. The reply might
be No, but they aid the group in competition with other groups. Or you
may say, as Darwin said, that even this competition will not account
for the civilised development of sympathy. But even so we are not at
the end of our tether; and we can fall back on the conflict of ideas.
The idea of sympathy or of altruism, for instance, may conflict with
some other idea, such as that of egoism. At first the competition is a
group-competition, in which the group with altruistic members succeeds
at the expense of the egoistic group. By the victory of the former our
society becomes more and more a society whose basis is sympathy and
all that sympathy implies, while conflicting ideas lose the lead. So
in general with the competition of ideas: the idea which fails to
adapt itself to its conditions will disappear, and the idea which is
thus adapted will persist; and this also (it is said) is just natural
selection. Now I venture to ask the question, Is it? I will put the
question whether all these three processes are really forms of the
same process, or, in other words and to put the matter more simply, Is
it simply natural selection that is operative in all these different
forms of competition?

For the sake of clearness I will take first this last-mentioned form
of competition, the process by which one idea drives another out of
the intellectual or moral currency of a community. The competition
between the idea of fixity of species and Darwin's idea of the unity
of life has been already cited as an instance; and it was pointed
out that, gradually and after a controversy of some forty years, the
former idea almost disappeared, and in the minds at any rate of those
who know, the Darwinian theory became victorious. Was it natural
selection that brought about the result? To test the matter let us ask
once more how natural selection operates. Its mode of operation is
always simply negative. And if, in the struggle of life