But the efficiency which a highly developed
society requires of its members is not the same as individual
development; it more commonly implies a specialisation which tends to
warp or cramp individual capacity. This is a long familiar opposition.
And the theory of evolution can do nothing to reconcile it All it can
say is that in certain cases natural selection points one way, and
that in certain cases it points the other way. If ethical significance
be claimed for it, it must be said that natural selection is divided
against itself, and that it is without any principle for reconciling
its own divergences.
It is because biological evolution is essentially an historical
doctrine that its votaries should not be too eager to apply it
directly to ethics. It has accomplished much if able to tell us how
things have happened in the past, without also dictating how they
ought to take place now. It is specially absurd to say that earlier
methods must govern later developments. That is what is done when we
are asked to take as our guide in voluntary choice a principle which
ignores volition. The whole progress from animal to man and from
savage to civilised man shows a gradual supersession of the principle
of natural selection by a principle of subjective selection which
steadily grows in purposiveness and in intelligence.
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