"from the laws of life it must be concluded that unceasing social discipline will so mould human nature, that eventually sympathetic pleasures will be spontaneously pursued to the fullest extent advantageous to each and all."—Ethics, § 95.
"With the highest type of human life, there will come also a state in which egoism and altruism are so conciliated that the one merges in the other."—Ib., appended chapter to Part I.
Everywhere it is asserted that the process of adaptation (which, in its direct and indirect forms, is a part of the cosmic process) must continuously tend (under peaceful conditions) to produce a type of society and a type of individual in which "the instincts of savagery in civilized men" will be not only "curbed," but repressed. And I believe that in few, if any, writings will be found as unceasing a denunciation of that brute form of the struggle for existence which has been going on between societies, and which, though in early times a cause of progress, is now becoming a cause of retrogression. No one has so often insisted that "the ethical process" is hindered by the cowardly conquests of bullet and shell over arrow and assegai, which demoralize the one side while slaughtering the other.
And here, while referring to the rebarbarizing effects of the struggle for existence carried on by brute force, let me say that I am glad to have Prof. Huxley's endorsement of the proposition that the survival of the fittest is not always the survival of the best. Twenty years ago, in an essay entitled "Mr. Martineau on Evolution," I pointed out that "the fittest" throughout a wide range of cases—perhaps the widest range—are not the "best"; and said that I had chosen the expression "survival of the fittest" rather than survival of the best because the latter phrase did not cover the facts.
Chiefly, however, I wish to point out the radical misconceptions which are current concerning that form of evolutionary ethics with which I am identified. In the preface to The Data of Ethics, when first published separately, I remarked that by treating the whole subject in parts, which would by many be read as though they were wholes, I had "given abundant opportunity for misrepresentation." The opportunity has not been lost. The division treating of "Justice" has been habitually spoken of as though nothing more was intended to be said; and this notwithstanding warnings which the division itself contains, as in § 257, and again in § 270; where it is said that "other injunctions which ethics has to utter do not here concern us . . . there are the demands and restraints included under Negative Beneficence and Positive Beneficence, to be hereafter
