—which will in the least degree tend to diminish vitality. Natural selection has practically no effect at all in exterminating those who adhere to this idea."[1] But the principle could hardly be maintained as a universal proposition with the history of the Middle Ages as a witness to the effect which adherence to an idea has had upon the life and health and fortunes of scores of individuals. It would be more to the point to show that the life, liberty or reputation of Bruno, Galileo, Lavoisier, Priestley, Flade, Agrippa, Bekker, and scores of others—among them Colenso, befriended and persecuted by Bishop Wilberforce—were unaffected by their adherence to ideas that were incompatible with prevailing beliefs.
But persecution, happily infrequent at present, is only incidental to the requirement we have been considering. With the growing complexity of human social relations it becomes evident that the expression 'staking one's life' or 'one's all' is no mere figure of speech. So delicate are the adjustments and so intricate the trains of circumstance set in motion by slight mischance, that health and bare life itself depend upon the nicety of these adjustments. If temperance, courage, and other basic qualities are necessary to the preservation of the health, strength, or efficiency of the individual, the scope and exercise of these virtues are in turn dependent upon countless intricate adjustments to social conditions or relations in which the individual is a worker for personal and social ends far removed from that of life itself. However strong and aggressive the individual and prominent the qualities that make for mere preservation of individual existence, the individual and these qualities are not quite the same in all conditions, and in the fulfilment of all functions in society. In contradiction to the evolutionist conception that these more complex—not to say 'higher'—functions and adjustments are mere modes of life-saving, that is, subordinate to the quite general ends of life and health, they seem directed rather to the conserving of life as identified with the correct fulfilment of functions in society. And natural selection—if it be applicable in this sphere—favors by its negation of maladjustments efficiency for
- ↑ W. R. Sorley, op. cit., p. 59.
