the fittest seems to have always been the survival of the strongest, keenest, swiftest, or the shrewdest, sharpest, most cunning and crafty. Nature, in selecting, seems to have no pity for the weak. She crowds remorselessly to the wall all who are not capable of sustaining themselves.
The analogies between physical life and social life are so striking, that it is perhaps not wonderful that political economists have applied this law of selection to the struggles caused by industrial competition. And when teachers and thinkers have so applied it, it is still less strange that, in the actual conflicts of industrial life, many men have adopted it as a rule of conduct. Indeed, if it be maintained that the science of political economy rests upon self-interest, and that its predominant force is competition, it would seem to be only a logical deduction that the struggles of trade must go on in a similar manner, and with similar results, to those that have occurred among animals. Even if it be urged that enlightened self-interest teaches that in the long run the welfare of the individual and the welfare of his fellow-men coincide, yet it may be replied that this coincidence is not complete and universal; and that, when self-interest is subjected to the stress of competition, it is very apt to result in pure egoism. Shall we, then, conclude that the rivalries of business, being but another form of the struggle for existence, must be carried on in the same spirit, generating like qualities, and for similar ends, as those which have accompanied the development of physical life; that material progress can only be assured by the big fish eating the little fish? This is not a comforting conclusion to reach, but the important question for us is, is it true?
Accepting the law of the struggle for existence as applying to life in all its phases from low to high, we have first to note an important difference between physical and social life. The laws governing the first are inexorable; that is to say, the organism affected can do nothing to determine the result. But in the social life of men their volitions are part of the necessary conditions. Herein lies an important difference between the methods of the simpler and the more complex sciences. For, "as Comte acutely pointed out, in the simpler sciences our object is gained if we can foretell the course of phenomena so as to be able to regulate our actions by it; while in the more complex sciences our object is gained when we have generalized the conditions under which phenomena occur, so as to be able to make our volitions count for something in modifying them."[1] In the physical sciences the method of study is to eliminate one by one the conflicting conditions, until the necessary condition is reached and the true cause discovered. In the social sciences the method consists
- ↑ Fiske's "Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy," vol. ii, p. 170.
