larger good of the life of the whole species. It is a nice balance that
nature has worked out in _Amoeba_, as well as in all other cases,
between the personal life of the individual, complete only when the final
process of multiplication supervenes, and this process itself, which
demands an efficient performance, even though this is destructive of the
performer.

Before passing to the next members of the series, which reveal additional
principles more truly social in the human sense, let us pause to note that
already we have found certain natural criteria that belong in the
department of ethics. Even in the case of the biological unit like
_Amoeba_, which is entirely solitary and unrelated to other individuals
of its kind excepting in so far as it is a link in the chain of successive
generations, any vital activity can be called good or bad, right or wrong.
Nature judges an act good and right if it tends to preserve the animal and
the species; an act is wrong and evil if it is biologically destructive of
the animal or if it interferes with the perpetuation of its kind. Again it
must be pointed out that these terms are human words, employed for the
complex conceptions that belong alone to retrospective and contemplative
human consciousness to most of us they seem to imply the existence of some
absolute standard or ideal by which a given act may be tested to see if it
is right or the opposite.

If human ethics is truly unrelated to beginnings found in lower nature,
something that has arisen by itself from supernature, then we must not use
the terms in question except by way of analogy. If, however, nature has
been continuous in the working out of every department of human life and
human thought through evolution, then the criteria of the righteousness of
the acts performed even by an _Amoeba_ may be found to be basic and
fundamental for ethical systems of whatever human race or time. This
subject remains to be discussed in the final chapter, but it must be clear
that we cannot survey the evolutionary process by which social systems
have come into being without dealing at the same time with the origin and
growth of ethical conduct as such.

* * * * *

Without leaving the group of one-celled animals typified by _Amoeba_, we
find colonies of the most elementary biological nature, where other
natural obligations are added to the two of greatest importance. Some
species of the bell-animalcule,