The Universal KinshipMoore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Philosophy
The Universal Kinship
Moore, J. Howard (John Howard)
Evolution; Human beings; Sociology
Animals are also _selected_, are enabled to survive in the struggle
for life quite as much through the possession by them of certain
mental qualities as on account of their physical characters. Whether
the selections are made by nature or by man, they are not determined
by the physical facts of size, strength, speed, and the like, more
than by cunning, courage, sagacity, skill, industry, devotion,
ferocity, tractability, and other mental properties. The fittest
survive, and the fittest may be the most timid or analytic as well
as the most powerful. No better illustration of this truth can be
found than that furnished by man himself. Man is by nature a
comparatively feeble animal. He is neither large nor powerful. Yet
he has been selected to prosper over all other animals because of
his ingenuity, sympathy, and art. The great feeling and civilisation
of higher men have been built up by slow accretion due to the
operation of the law of survival extending over vast measures of
time. Creeds and instincts, governments and impulses, forms of
thought and forms of expression, have struggled and survived just as
have cells and species. A struggle for existence is constantly going
on, as Max Müller has pointed out, even among the words and
grammatical forms of every language. The better, shorter, easier
forms are constantly gaining the ascendancy, and the longer and more
cumbrous expressions grow obsolete.
If, therefore, the higher types of mind have not come into existence
as have the higher types of structure, through evolution from
simpler and more generalised forms, it has not been due to the
absence of the factors necessary for bringing about this evolution.
5. The presumption created by the existence of the factors of
psychic evolution is strengthened by the facts of artificial
selection. We _know_ mind _can_ evolve, _for it has done so in many
cases_. The races of domesticated animals, the races whom man has
exploited and preyed upon during the past several thousand years,
have, many of them, been completely changed in character and
intelligence through human selection. Old instincts have been wiped
out and new ones implanted. In many instances the psychology has
been not only revolutionised, but remade.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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