LITMIR.BIZ

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as it fits its environment—the physical environment in the case of vegetables and the lower animals, the physical, social, intellectual and moral environment in the case of man. The kind of glove that most perfectly fits the hand is the fittest glove and will survive in the struggle for existence between gloves. If, instead of a glove, we take a living creature, say a microbe, the kind of microbe that best fits into the environment provided by, say, human blood, is the fittest and will survive and be the cause of our commonest disease. Thus the tubercle bacillus is at once the fittest microbe and, not the best, but the worst. Among ourselves, the newspaper devoted to yesterday's murder is the fittest and survives, ousting the newspaper which reckons with the crucifixion, or the murder of Socrates or Bruno. In a society of blackguardism, the biggest blackguard is the fittest man and will survive: he is also the worst. In another society the best man is the fittest and survives. The capacity to fit into the environment is the capacity that determines survival: it has no moral connotation whatever. If Herbert Spencer had written the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells desires, he would have written palpable nonsense: as it was he used the fittest word—in this case also the best, because the truest. Referring to the queen-bee, who destroys her own daughters, Darwin says, “undoubtedly this is for the good of the community; maternal love or maternal hatred, though the latter fortunately is most rare, is all the same to the inexorable principle of natural selection.”

      If natural selection were the survival of the better, as Mr. Wells would have us believe, there would be nothing for eugenics or race-culture to do: and heaven would long ago have come to earth. If in all ages the better men and women had survived and become parents, earth would long ago have become a demi-paradise indeed, there would have been no arrests, no reversals in the history of human progress, and life would be already what, some day, it will be, when there is achieved the eugenic ideal—which is precisely that the best or better members of our race shall be the selected for the supreme profession of parenthood. In other words, the eugenic ideal, the ideal of race-culture, is to ensure that the fittest shall be the best. Always, everywhere, without a solitary exception, human, animal or vegetable, the fittest have ultimately survived and must survive. Once realise what is the meaning of the word fit—best seen in the verb “to fit”—and we shall see that, as Herbert Spencer pointed out in his overwhelming reply to the late Lord Salisbury's attack on evolution, the idea of the survival of the fittest is a necessity of thought.[10]

      But, alas, the idea of the survival of the best or the better is not a necessity of thought! The fittest microbes are the worst from our point of view, because they are most inimical to the highest forms of life; the fittest newspaper may be the worst, because it panders to the worst but most widespread and irresponsible elements in human nature; everything and every one that succeeds, succeeds because it or he fits the conditions: but to succeed is not necessarily to be good. Indeed everything that exists at all, living or lifeless, an atom or an animal, a molecule or a moon, exists because it can exist, because it fits the conditions of existence: there is no moral question involved, but only a mechanical one. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to make an environment, conditions of law and public opinion, such that the fittest shall be the best and the best the fittest therein.

      If memory may be trusted, the primary meaning of the word fit has not hitherto been called in by any one to elucidate the meaning of Spencer's phrase: perhaps it may be hoped that we shall at last begin to understand it, if we remember that a thing is fit because it fits. It is best not to be too sanguine, however, and therefore we may attempt to illustrate the case from another aspect.

      

      Survival-value.—Every living thing and nearly every character or feature of a living thing that survives, survives because it has value or capacity for life—which may be called, in Professor Lloyd Morgan's phrase, survival-value. The character that gives an organism survival-value, or value for life, the character that enables it to fit its environment, may be of any order. The atom, as I have said elsewhere, is an organism writ small. The kinds of atoms that have survived in the age-long struggle for existence between atoms are those that have survival-value on account of their internal stability: as Empedocles argued ages ago. In the case of living things, which individually die, it is evident that the capacity to reproduce themselves is one of supreme survival-value. If mankind lost this capacity, all its other characters of survival-value, such as intelligence, would obviously avail it nought. Certain valuable members of society may fall short in this cardinal respect, and therefore become extinct. Indeed, other forms of survival-value, as we shall see, seem to be in large measure inimical to fertility: and this is perhaps the chief obstacle to eugenics.[11]

      Fertility apart, the character having survival-value may take a thousand forms. In the case of the parasitic microbe it is an evil character, the power to produce toxins or poisons. In the case of the tiger it is the possession of large and powerful bones and claws and muscles and teeth. In the case of the ox it is a complicated and efficient digestive apparatus, enabling it to fit into a food-environment which is too innutritious to sustain the life of creatures not so endowed. Nature seeks only the fittest; not the best but the best-adapted; she asks no moral questions. A Keats, a Spinoza, or a Schubert must go under if his factors of survival-value do not enable him to resist those of the tubercle bacillus, its toxins or poisons. She welcomes the parasitic tapeworm, all hooks and mouth or stomach, because these give it survival-value; and so on.

      The business of eugenics or race-culture, then, is to create an environment such that those characters which we desire as moral and intelligent beings shall be endowed with the highest possible survival-value, as against those which ally so many men with the microbe and the tapeworm. There are those who live in society to-day, and reproduce their like, in virtue of the poisons they produce, in virtue of their tenacious hooks and voracious stomachs. If society be organised so that these are factors of more survival-value than the disinterested search for truth, or mother-love, or the power to create great poetry or music—then, according to the inevitable and universal law of the survival of the fittest, our parasites will oust our poets and our poisoners our philosophers. These things have happened and may happen again at any time. It does not matter that the good thing, in virtue of survival-value then superior, has been evolved. Nature never gives a final verdict in favour of good or bad but only and always in favour of the fit. Let the conditions change, so that rapacity fits them better than righteousness, or—as in a completely “collectivist” state—vegetableness rather than virility, and the thing we call high will go under before the thing we call low. Nature recognises neither high nor low but only fitness or value for life in the conditions that actually obtain. These laws enthroned and dethroned the civilisations of the past: they have enthroned and may dethrone us. But this end is not inevitable, since man—and this is his great character—not merely reacts to his environment, as all creatures must, but can create and recreate it. The business of eugenics or race-culture is to create an environment such that the human characters of which the human spirit approves shall in it outweigh those of which we disapprove. Make it fittest to be best and the best will win—not because it is the best, but because it is the fittest: had the worst been the fittest it would have won. In society to-day both forms of the process may be observed. The balance between them determines its destiny. It is the business of eugenics to throw the whole weight of human purpose into the scale of the good.

      Evolution not necessarily progress.—No excessive space has been devoted to this distinction between the fittest and the best and to the real meaning of Spencer's famous phrase, if perchance it should avail in any degree to dispel one of the commonest of the many common delusions regarding the nature of organic evolution and its outcome. This delusion is that progress is an inevitable law of nature.[12] The great process of history, as revealed by biology, displays as its supreme fact the occurrence of progress. The principles of evolution teach that this progress—as, for instance, in the evolution of man—is a product of the survival of the fittest; whilst we are also reminded that the survival of the fittest is a necessary truth: but it does not follow that progress is inevitable.

      In the first place, natural selection involves selection. Where all the young members of a new generation of any species survive, and parenthood becomes not a privilege but a common and universal function, plainly the process is in abeyance: and, in the second place, since the survival of the fittest is not

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