The very fact of progress, which I would define as the emergence and increasing dominance of mind, demonstrates--it being remembered that natural selection has no moral prejudices--that even in a world of claws and toxins the psychical must have possessed sufficient survival-value to survive. It is quite evident that even the lowliest psychical characters, such as sharpness of sensation, discrimination, and memory, must be of value in the struggle for life. More and more we might expect to find, and do actually find in the course of evolution, that creatures live by their wits, rather than by force of bone or muscle. The psychical was certainly given no unfair start--on the contrary. It has had to struggle for its emergence; it has emerged only where there has been struggle and has done so because it could--because of its superior survival-value. It has the right which belongs to might--in the world of life there is no other.[13] By no means less evident is the inherently superior survival-value of the psychical, if we turn from its aspects of sensation and intelligence to those which are all summed up under the word love. Notwithstanding Nietzsche's mad misconception of the Darwinian theory, no one who has studied the facts of reproduction and its conditions in the world of life can question the incalculable survival-value of love in animal history. The success of those most ancient of all societies, of which the ant-heap and the bee-hive are the types, depends absolutely upon the self-sacrifice of the individual. If we pass upwards from the insects to the lowest vertebrates, we find the survival-value of love proved by the comparison between various species of fish, and its increasing importance may be traced upwards through amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals in succession, up to man. Natural selection thus actually selects morality. Without love no baby could live for twenty-four hours. Every human being that exists or ever has existed or ever will exist is a product of mother-love or foster-mother-love, and I am well entitled to say, as I have so often said, _no morals, no man_. The creature in whom organic morality is at its height has become the lord of the earth in virtue of that morality which natural selection has selected, not from any moral bias, but because of its superior survival-value. CHAPTER IV THE SELECTION OF MIND “Many are the mighty things, but none is mightier than man.... He conquers by his devices the tenant of the fields.”--Sophocles. “L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la Nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant.”--Pascal. “The soul of all improvement is the improvement of the soul.”--Burchell.