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46 HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL : opinion in a sense co-ordinate with the conflict for and sur- vival of life. There is no destruction of one conception by another. Survival of an opinion must evidently depend largely upon the survival of the race holding that opinion, and this survival may often be only most incidentally affected by the opinion itself. In tribal contests, famine, or the sword of a more muscular or numerous neighbour, may blot out a race in which subtlety of thought has been developed to a much higher degree than it has been de- veloped in the race that conquers and survives. On the other hand, the man who reflects and reasons, pictures the life of his fellow-man as it differs from his own, and if his imagination of the totality of results of certain habits in his neighbour is on the whole more pleasant than the picture of the results of his own differing habits, there is aroused an unconscious tendency within him to follow his inborn " imitative instincts " and to alter his mode of life to accord with that of his fellow. This process w T ould be effective to alter moral standards, and in ways which would be almost entirely indifferent so far as the laws of direct struggle for existence are con- cerned. These latter laws would not take effect in con- nexion with these differentiations until the alteration of thought had affected belief, and belief had affected action in some direction that related to the survival contest. As long as these changes of mode of life and standards were indifferent so far as the general welfare was concerned they would probably continue to gain in strength : when they became well established they might become distinctly ad- vantageous or disadvantageous to the race, and then indeed they would become factors of importance in connexion with the law of survival : but from the ethical point of view the habit of imitation after reflexion is more important to be considered, so far as it relates to the formation of new and higher standards ; and the development of this imita- tive instinct in the higher life of man, which is acknowledged by all psychologists to-day, makes it a most potent factor in that emphasis of variation through reason which we are considering. 7. Enough has been said, I think, to convince the reader that with the growth in complexity of life in communities, as we experience it, there will be many forces at work leading to a repressal of racial influences and to an empha- sis of individual variant ones : bringing about on the whole an emphasis of Reason and a subordination within us of