It is possible that the mistaken identification of evolution with a single theory of its process, struggle for existence and survival of the fittest, has aided and abetted selfishness and ruthlessness in competitive business and competitive nationalism. But this kind of competition does not wait for scientific justification, and when it alleges evolution as an excuse, it indulges in self-sophistication just as do the sybarites who have been mentioned. For “existence” does not mean the same thing for man and his animal ancestors, and therefore “fittest” does not. In pre-human species there is no precedent for the alternatives between which the business man and the statesman have to choose. Rationalization again! It is scarcely necessary to inquire whether academic ethical theory has been seduced by the evolutionary aspect of life. Little more is needed than to recall a name and a circumstance or two. The name is that of Huxley, rigorous evolutionist, who with all the emphasis that he could command insisted that the tooth-and-claw principle does not apply to the human species. An important circumstance is the blossoming of humanitarian service during this period, with its inevitable reverberation in ethical thinking. The ethical life is now almost universally understood to be the life of mutual helpfulness. This view is strongly backed up by sociology, theoretical and practical, with its continual reminder of the solidarity of men, and by the parallel development of social psychology, which finds that personal existence as such is a mutual affair. All the more reason, then, for asking why anybody supposes that our respect for ourselves depends at all upon our holding or not holding the evolution theory. If, in order to answer this question, I must flail some old straw, the excuse is that the search for the sources of our twentieth-century depreciation of man is worthy of some thoroughness. Well, then, it is clear that there is no logical thoroughfare between our disillusionment and the theory of descent. As far as the logic of the theological anxiety is concerned, Huxley’s retort to Wilberforce in the famous sitting of the British Association is final. If we were logical, it would be far more derogatory to our _amour propre_ to be related to a human scoundrel, or even, as Huxley so crushingly said, to an evasive, only half-honest debater, than to reckon ape-like creatures in our ancestry.