The Edinburgh lectures on mental science / by T. Troward.

  • Thomas Troward
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Edinburgh lectures on mental science / by T. Troward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    progression it is clear that, however we may conceive the nature of the evolutionary principle, it unerringly provides for the continual advance of the race. But it does this by creating such numbers of each kind that, after allowing a wide margin for all possible accidents to individuals, the race shall still continue :— “ So careful of the type it seems So careless of the single life.” In short, we may say that the cosmic intelligence works by a Law of Averages which allows a wide margin of accident and failure to the individual. But the progress towards higher intelligence is always in the direction of narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and more out of the law of averages, and substi- tuting the law of individual selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea with them if every individual survived ; but the margin of destruction is corres- pondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up the normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale repro- duction is by no means thus enormously in excess of survival. True, there is ample margin of accident and disease cutting off numbers of human beings before they have gone through the average duration
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