Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/151

slight and gradual as not to suggest difference of origin or distinction in kind, but, on the contrary, to indicate clearly their kinship and community of origin. Still, these differentiations among the members, and the consequent differences in their adaptation to the Whole, involve a difference in their power to persist amid the mutual competition which their common presence in the Whole implies. In this silent and unconscious competition of tendencies to persist, which is called, in a somewhat exaggerated metaphor, the “struggle for existence,” the members of the least adaptation to the Whole must perish earliest, and only those of the highest adaptation will finally survive. Accordingly, by an exaggeration akin to that of the former metaphor, we may, in another, name the resulting persistence of the members most suited to the Whole the “survival of the fittest”; and as it is the Whole that determines the standard of adaptation, we may also, by figuratively personifying the Whole, call the process of antagonistic interaction through which the survivors persist, a process of “natural selection.” Here, now, the points of determining import for inference are these: (1) That the “survival” is only of the fittest to the Whole; (2) that it is the Whole alone that “selects”; (3) that no “survival,” as verifiable by the strictly empirical method, can be taken as permanent, but that even the latest must be reckoned