Any attempt to cast up accounts between the evil of the process and the good of the result--especially any attempt based on the assumption that the process has yet achieved its final result--would be not only premature in the eyes of those who can look forwards, but would be irrelevant to our present enquiry. I certainly am with those who repudiate as misleading Mill's description of Nature as a “vast slaughter-house,” and will declare that, apart from self-conscious and supremely sensitive man, it is easy to exaggerate the misery and to minimise the joy of the sub-human world. But our business here is with the process and its results in man himself, in whom alone are possible the heights of ecstasy and the depths of agony: and the thesis--the sublime thesis, we may avouch--of the present discussion is that, whatever the balance between the evil of the process of Natural Selection and the good of its results in the natural state, yet when it is transmuted, as it may be, by the moral intelligence of man, according to the principles of race-culture or eugenics, the good of the result can be attained, more abundantly and incomparably more rapidly, than ever heretofore, _whilst the evil of the process can be abolished altogether_. True or false, is this not a sublime thesis? =Nature must be cruel to be kind.=--If organic fitness or adaptation to the circumstances of life is to be secured, Nature must choose for future parents, out of every new generation, only those whose inborn characters make for this adaptation, and who, in virtue of the fact we call heredity, will tend to transmit this fitness to their offspring. Now it is often convenient to personify Nature, but we must not be misled. The process is really an automatic, not an intelligently directed one. In order that it shall be possible, certain conditions must obtain. The choice or selection depends not merely upon the provision of a variety from which to choose--this being afforded by what is called variation, which is the correlative of heredity, both being obvious facts in any well-filled nursery--but also upon the production of _more_ young creatures than there is or will be room for. (If there be room for all, so that all survive, there can be no selection, and instead of survival of the fittest there will be indiscriminate survival.) The choice is effected amongst this superfluity by an internecine “struggle for existence”: hence the “murdering and being murdered,” hence the “blood and tears.” The motor force of the whole process may be symbolised as the “will to life,” ever seeking to realise itself in more abundance and with more success--with more and more approximation to perfect adaptation. The will to death is no ingredient of the will to life. Nature is, so to say, by no means desirous of the process of “murdering and being murdered”: very much on the contrary. It is life, more life, and fitter life, that is her desire: the “murdering and being murdered,”