Habit and instinct / by C. Lloyd Morgan.

  • C. Lloyd Morgan
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Habit and instinct / by C. Lloyd Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    be the elimination of drunkenness and sensuality *; society is at war with the criminal, and doing its best, so far as the sometimes short-sighted leniency of public opinion will permit, to eliminate him. But, when all is said and done, natural selection plays but a subordinate part in the life of civilized mankind. The method of conscious choice has in large degree superseded that of natural selection. Now we must use the phrase “natural selection” in its biological acceptation, and not, as is so often done in discussions on social evolution, in a vague general and half metaphorical sense, through neglecting the difference between natural selection through the elimination of failures, and choice through the play of intelligence.! By * I leave this passage as it stood in the MS. of my Lowell Lectures. Dr. G. A. Reid has since published a work on “ The Present Evolution of Man,” in which the point is worked out with great care and skill. He contends that drunkenness and the excessive opium habit tends to disappear in com- munities wherein the free use of these drugs has led to the elimination of those who abused them to a fatally deleterious extent. t As before noted, Mr. S. Alexander, in his interesting contributions in the domain of ethics, fails to distinguish between natural selection and con- scious choice. “ The war of natural selection,” he says, “ is carried on in human affairs not against weaker or incompatible individuals, but against their ideals or modes of life. It does not suffer any mode of life to prevail or persist but one which is compatible with social welfare.” “ Persuasion and education, in fact, without destruction, replace here the process of propagation of its own species and destruction of the rival ones, by which in the natural world species become numerically strong and persistent.” And again, “ Persuasion corresponds to the extermination of the rivals.” But, as Mr. Alexander himself indicates, persuasion is the condition, not to natural selection through elimination, but to conscious choice. We endeavour by persuasion to induce others to choose the ideals which have been the objects of our own choice. This is not natural selection; and the loose application of this term to the process can result only in a confusion of ideas. (See “Moral Order and Progress,” and an article on “Natural Selection in Morals ” in the International Journal of Ethics, vol. ii. (1882), pp. 409, 439.) it is instructive to compare Professor Huxley’s treatment of ethical and social problems with that of Mr. Alexander. No one can read the ninth volume of Huxley’s “Collected Essays,”—that on “Evolution and Ethics”—without seeing that he clearly perceived the distinction between the method of natural selection and that of conscious choice which supersedes it in
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