Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Huxley Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    I back, it is not because there is any reason to tliink we have readied the beginning, hut because the trail of the most ancient life remains liidden, or has become obliterated. Thus that state of nature of the world of plants, which we began by considering, is far from possess- ing the attribute of permanence. Rather its very essence is impermanence. It may have lasted twenty or thirty thousand years, it may last for twenty or thirty thousand years more, without obvious change; but, as surely as it has followed upon a very different state, so it will be followed by an equally different condition. That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transi- tory expressions. And in the living world, one of the most characteristic features of this cosmic pro- cess is the struggle for existence, the competition of each with all, the result of which is the selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which are, there- fore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest.^ The acme reached by the cosmic process 1 That every theory of evolution must he consistent not merely with ])rogressive development, but with indefinite persistence in the same condition and with retrogressive modifi- cation, is a point which I have insisted upon repeatedly from the year 1862 till now. See Collected Essays, vol. ii. pp. 461-89 : vol. iii. p. 33 ; vol. viii. p. 304. In the address on “Geological