creature who in very truth is seeking so to encumber life as to prevent its carrying him on, so to contract his own life as to prevent its intermingling with the lives of others. In short they are proper to one who is arresting life in himself as it has been arrested in the tiger or the ant. It will be arrested at a higher point—that is all; and it will be consciously arrested by the conscious building up of an obstacle far more serious than death. Therefore it is no mere failure; it is sin—sin against the true nature of human life. The mechanistic theories of biology, which have helped to confirm men in an evil course, are fast being discredited. With them will go a false philosophy which has been widely current of late and has had an influence reaching far beyond an acquaintance with its authors' names. Critical and careful biologists are now undoubtedly doing much to effect this salutary change. Yet, may be, we shall be driven to call some of their opponents (as has been prophesied) by the bad name of necrologists, that we may perhaps shock them into self-knowledge. It is a name only too grievously appropriate now, since the picture of natural evolution they have, all innocently, drawn has not only foreshadowed, but contributed to fill, the grave-yard of the peoples dug in the great war. We are changing this baleful picture; we are learning too, partly in consequence, that the self-interest of utilitarian economists and the ruthless search for individual advantage which social mechanists have commended are not the mainsprings of evolution. Of far greater, more lasting, and more profound significance and effect than the self-interested struggle for existence among animals and plants has been the species-interest to which self-interest has been subordinated. A creature must first eat and only afterwards reproduce; but this in no way justifies us in thinking that competition for food is charged with more meaning in the long story of life than the protective care of parents for their offspring and the eminently natural self-sacrifice it involves. Progress among both animals and vegetables has been secured more by 'species maintaining' efforts than by a mere self-seeking struggle for self-restricted ends. It is a recognition of this fact that makes a distinguished biologist say, 'The ideal of evolution is thus no gladiator's show, but an Eden; and although competition can never be wholly eliminated ... it is much for our pure natural history to see no longer struggle, but love as "creation's final law."' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART II ------- CHAPTER I