Intercommunication in the biological sense has, however, never been systematically cultivated by man, but has been allowed to develop haphazard and subject to all the hostile influences which must infest a society in which unregulated competition and selection are allowed to prevail. The extravagance of human life and labour, the indifference to suffering, the harshness and the infinite class segregation of human society are the result. The use of what I have called conscious direction is apparently the only means whereby this chaos can be converted into organized structure. Outside the gregarious unit, the forms of organic life at any given time seem to be to some considerable extent determined by the fact that the pressure of environmental conditions and of competition tends to eliminate selectively the types which are comparatively unsuited to the conditions in which they find themselves. However much or little this process of natural selection has decided the course which the general evolutionary process has taken, there can be no doubt that it is a condition of animal life, and has an active influence. The suggestion may be hazarded that under circumstances natural selection tends rather to restrict variation instead of encouraging it as it has sometimes been supposed to do. When the external pressure is very severe it might be supposed that anything like free variation {160} would be a serious disadvantage to a species, and if it persisted might result in actual extermination. It is conceivable, therefore, that natural selection is capable of favouring stable and non-progressive types at the expense of the variable and possibly “progressive,” if such a term can be applied to species advancing towards extinction. Such a possible fixative action of natural selection is suggested by the fact that the appearance of mechanisms whereby the individual is protected from the direct action of natural selection seems to have led to an outburst of variation. In the multicellular animal the individual cells passing from under the direct pressure of natural selection become variable, and so capable of a very great specialization. In the gregarious unit the same thing happens, the individual member gaining freedom to vary and to become specialized without the risk that would have accompanied such an endowment in the solitary state.