The term 'fit' is apt to be misused by being interpreted with reference to a former environment. The environment is now a social one, and the content of the term 'fit' has to be made with reference to social adaptation. It is still the fittest that survive; it is the conditions which have changed. (2) The concept of struggle for existence is also controlled by the environment in which the struggle takes place. Self-assertion is positively as well as negatively a factor in the ethical process. Self-restraint is simply a factor within self-assertion; it relates to the particular ways in which self-assertion is made. The alleged distinction between the struggle for existence and the struggle for happiness is not consistently maintained by Huxley, and is besides an invalid distinction. The difference between the cosmic and the ethical struggle is simply that an act, which was once adapted to given conditions, must now be adapted to other conditions. This is the truth of Huxley's opposition of the moral and the natural order. The tension is between an organ adjusted to a past state and the function required by present conditions. This tension demands reconstruction, not annihilation or substitution. Such a struggle is the permanent law of the ethical process. It is conflict with the end or ideal that keeps habit working and makes it a flexible and efficient instrument of action. It is as important that the ideal should meet the opposition of impulse, as it is that the animal prompting should be held to the function suggested by the ideal. (3) Ethical or social selection is not radically different from natural selection. Ordeal by death is not the only form of natural selection; there is also the trial by the success or failure of specific acts. Through public opinion and education, certain forms of action are constantly stimulated and encouraged, while other types are as constantly repressed and punished. The difference between man and animal is not that selection has ceased, but that selection along the line of variations which enlarge and intensify the environment is active as never before. The entire distinction between the ethical and the cosmic process lies in the fact that the process comes to consciousness in man; this is the distinction between the moral and unmoral. In his moral struggle man is not engaged in conflict with the cosmos; he acts as an organ in maintaining and carrying forward the universal process.
This article emphasizes the need of detailed information about every phase of ethical experience as a necessary basis for ethical speculation. Opposing theorists must be forced to face the question of the nature and extent of possible divergences from their own standpoint and modes of thought. The writer desires to set forth the validity and usefulness of a method for investigating the facts of the moral consciousness which are generally neglected or taken for granted. Certain fundamental assertions (which are supported by no evidence of universality) in Martineau's Types
