What is more important, however, than the fact that heritable “fitness” may be completely divorced from mental and moral excellence, is the fact that so large a part of man’s mental and moral characteristics are not heritable at all, and cannot therefore be directly due to organic selection. Races may accumulate accomplishments, yet remain organically unchanged. They may learn and they may forget, they may rise from barbarism to culture, and sink back from culture to barbarism, while through all these revolutions the raw material of their humanity varies never a bit. In such cases there can be no question of Natural Selection in the sense in which biologists use the term. And there are other considerations which suggest that, as development proceeds, the forces of organic selection diminish. While man was in the making we may easily believe that those possessing no congenital instinct for loyalty failed, and that failure involved elimination. In such circumstances, the hereditary instinct would become an inbred characteristic of the race. But in a civilised, or even in a semi-civilised, world, the success of one competitor has rarely involved the extinction of the other—at least by mere slaughter. When extinction has followed defeat, it has been due rather to the gradual effects of disease and hardship, or to other causes more obscure, but not less deadly. The endless struggles between tribes, cities, nations, and races, have in the main been struggles for domination, not for existence. Slavery, not death, has been the penalty of failure; and if domination has produced a change in the inherited type, it is not because the conquered has perished before the conqueror, but because, conquest having brought them together, the two have intermarried. There is thus no close or necessary connection between biological “fitness” and military or political success. The beaten race, whose institutions or culture perish, may be the race which in fact survives; while victors who firmly establish their language, religion, and polity may, after a few centuries, leave scarce a trace behind them of any heritable characteristics which the anthropologist is able to detect. This observation, however, suggests a new point. Is there not, you may ask, a “struggle for existence” between non-heritable acquirements which faintly resembles the biological struggle between individuals or species? Religious systems, political organisations, speculative creeds, industrial inventions, national policies, scientific generalisations, and (what specially concerns us now) ethical ideals, are in perpetual competition and conflict. Some maintain themselves or expand. These are, by definition, the “fit.” Some wane or perish. These are, by definition, the unfit. Here we find selection, survival, elimination; and, though we see them at work in quite other regions of reality than those explored by the student of organic evolution, the analogy between the two cases is obvious.