Now, when the phrase 'natural selection in morals' is used, the reference is commonly to a conflict of this last kind. The suggestion is that different ideas and also different standards of action are manifested at the same time within the same community, that they compete with one another for existence, and that gradually those which are better adapted to the life of the community survive, while the others grow weaker and in the end disappear. In this way the law of natural selection is made to apply to moral ideas and moral standards, and also to intellectual standards and to the institutions and customs in which our ideas are expressed. These, then, are the three ways in which the competition in man's life and the selection between the competing factors is carried out. And sometimes I think one sees a tendency to suggest that this needs only to be stated, and that the whole question of the application of evolution to ethics is then settled. You may say that such and such moral qualities, as for instance the quality of sympathy, do not aid the individual in competition with other individuals. The reply might be No, but they aid the group in competition with other groups. Or you may say, as Darwin said, that even this competition will not account for the civilised development of sympathy. But even so we are not at the end of our tether; and we can fall back on the conflict of ideas. The idea of sympathy or of altruism, for instance, may conflict with some other idea, such as that of egoism. At first the competition is a group-competition, in which the group with altruistic members succeeds at the expense of the egoistic group. By the victory of the former our society becomes more and more a society whose basis is sympathy and all that sympathy implies, while conflicting ideas lose the lead. So in general with the competition of ideas: the idea which fails to adapt itself to its conditions will disappear, and the idea which is thus adapted will persist; and this also (it is said) is just natural selection. Now I venture to ask the question, Is it? I will put the question whether all these three processes are really forms of the same process, or, in other words and to put the matter more simply, Is it simply natural selection that is operative in all these different forms of competition?