as it does not directly concern the struggle for social existence and
thus belong to the second class) the competition between institutions,
including therein also habits and customs. The various institutions in
our national life, and the various habits of our life, may be said to
be forms which have to maintain themselves often in competition with
other and antagonistic forms of institution. The same holds of our
various ideas or general conceptions, whether about morality, which we
have now specially in view, or about matters more purely intellectual.
For instance, forty or fifty years ago, there was a fierce controversy
amongst biologists between the group of ideas represented by Darwin's
theory and the group of ideas represented by the traditional view of
the fixity of species. There was a long conflict between these two
groups of ideas, and we may now say that the Darwinian group of ideas
has emerged from the conflict victorious.

Now, when the phrase 'natural selection in morals' is used, the
reference is commonly to a conflict of this last kind. The suggestion
is that different ideas and also different standards of action are
manifested at the same time within the same community, that they
compete with one another for existence, and that gradually those which
are better adapted to the life of the community survive, while the
others grow weaker and in the end disappear. In this way the law of
natural selection is made to apply to moral ideas and moral standards,
and also to intellectual standards and to the institutions and customs
in which our ideas are expressed.

These, then, are the three ways in which the competition in man's life
and the selection between the competing factors is carried out. And
sometimes I think one sees a tendency to suggest that this needs
only to be stated, and that the whole question of the application of