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.
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