the fact
that there is no need to employ the spectacles of Malthus in order to
detect the struggle for existence in nature,--the contradiction
between the innumerable mass of germs which nature produces in such
prodigality and the slight number which can manage to reach maturity,
a contradiction which resolves itself into an apparently grim fight
for existence. And with regard to the law of wages the Malthusian
doctrines are widely advertised and Ricardo based his contentions upon
them,--so the struggle for existence in nature may find a standing
even without the Malthusian interpretation. Besides the organisms of
nature have their law of population, the establishment of which would
decide the theories of the development of species. And who gave the
decisive impetus in that direction? Nobody but Darwin.

Herr Duehring is on his guard against entering upon the positive side
of this question. Instead he must again find fault with the struggle
for existence. There can be no argument about a struggle for existence
between plants and the genial eaters of plants "in a sufficiently
accurate sense the struggle for existence only occurs within the
sphere of brutality, in so far as nourishment depends upon robbery and
consumption." And after he has reduced the concept struggle for
existence to these narrow limits he gives his wrath free play as
regards the brutality of this conception which he himself has narrowed
down to a brutal conception. But this moral wrath simply reacts on
Herr Duehring himself, the inventor of this sort of struggle for
existence. It is not Darwin therefore who seeks among the lower
animals the "conditions of the operations of nature" (as a matter of
fact Darwin would have included the whole of organic nature in the
struggle), but one of Herr Duehring's bugaboos. The expression
"struggle for existence" in particular excites Herr Duehring's lofty
moral scorn. That this actually exists among plants every meadow,
every cornfield and every wood can show him. We need not trouble about
the name, whether one call it "struggle for existence" or "lack of the
conditions of existence and want of mechanical realisation," but as to
how this fact operates as regards the maintenance or transformation of
species. With regard to this Herr Duehring persists in a
characteristically stubborn silence. We cannot trouble ourselves any
more about natural selection.

But "Darwinism produces its changes and differentiations out o