“Purely passive, or what may be styled mechanical evolution, displays the awe-inspiring spectacle of a vast eddy of organic turmoil ... it is moulded by blind and wasteful processes, namely, by an extravagant production of raw material and the ruthless rejection of all that is superfluous, through the blundering steps of trial and error.... Evolution is in any case a grand phantasmagoria, but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect under the knowledge that the intelligent action of the human will is, in some small measure, capable of directing its course. Man has the power of doing this largely so far as the evolution of humanity is concerned; he has already affected the quality and distribution of organic life so widely that the changes on the surface of the earth, merely through his disforestings and agriculture, would be recognisable from a distance as great as that of the moon.” Hear also Sir E. Ray Lankester, in the Romanes Lecture[7] for 1905: “Man is ... a product of the definite and orderly evolution which is universal, a being resulting from and driven by the one great nexus of mechanism which we call Nature. He stands alone, face to face with that relentless mechanism. It is his destiny to understand and to control it.” “Nature's insurgent son,” Professor Lankester calls man in this lecture: and yet again there recurs that mighty aphorism of Bacon, which might well be printed on every page of these chapters, “Nature is to be commanded only by obeying her.” The struggle for existence is the terrible fact of Nature, but is only a means to an end. It is our destiny to command the end whilst _humanising_ the means. =The struggle for existence.=--The ideal of eugenics or race-culture is to abolish the brutal elements of the struggle for existence whilst gaining its great end. The nature of this struggle is commonly misapprehended and, as I cannot improve upon the words of Professor Lankester, I shall freely use them in the attempt to show what it really is. He says:--