The qualities which make man a human being are tenderness, pity, mercy, compassion, self-sacrifice, and love. It is in their growth--the "ethical process"--that human progress consists, and not in the ruthlessness by which the cosmic process effects the evolution of other organisms. These qualities--human and humane--do not make for success in the struggle for existence. They are not adapted to the environment provided by Nature. Their owners were not the fittest to survive, and consequently paid the penalty--physical destruction--as far as the cosmic process could exact it. If the struggle for existence and the action of the environment have not succeeded in keeping man down to the level of the brute, it is because man has deliberately set himself to oppose the cosmic process and the blind forces, knowing nothing of right and wrong, pity or love, by which it effects the evolution of the brute. The struggle for existence is fatal to the development of the qualities which are peculiarly characteristic of humanity, and man accordingly has suspended the struggle for existence. In place of warring with his fellow-man, he has begun to co-operate with him. He has learnt to some extent to postpone the gratification of his own wants to the satisfaction of those of others. He no longer destroys the weakly, the sick, the helpless, the useless, or even the criminal; and, if the environment threaten their destruction, he sets to work to alter the environment. Man no longer seeks to conquer Nature by obeying her: he studies her forces in order to command them to his will. Adaptation to environment is the implement by which she shapes human evolution to ends that are not his ends; he wrests the weapon from her hands, and by adaptation of the environment undoes her work, fosters the growth of those qualities which tend towards his ideal, and does away with the conditions which harbour ignorance and error, selfishness and sin. Human progress, then, consists in perpetual approximation to the ideals of charity, love, and self-sacrifice. Life is exhibited as a struggle against evil, against the ape and tiger within us which we inherit from our ancestor--the brute. The evil is real, the struggle is hard but worthy, and not the less worthy because it is not directed to our personal happiness and gratification. "The practice of self-restraint and renunciation is not happiness, though it may be something much better."[2]