occupying Chairs of Biology. Apart from that I do not think it will
hinder them in any of the various modes of activity in which the
struggle for life is manifested.

What was it then that led to the victory of the one idea over the
other? The cause was intellectual. With the experts, it was logical
conviction: one set of ideas was found to fit the facts somewhat
better than the other set of ideas. With men in general the
intellectual change came more slowly and in a different way: they
adopted or imitated the ideas of those who knew. It was therefore not
natural selection at all which led to the presence and power of the
one idea rather than the other in the minds of thoughtful men. One
idea was deliberately accepted and the other deliberately rejected.
The former was accepted on grounds of which the most general account
would be, if we may use the term, to call them subjective. But natural
selection is a physical, external, objective process. It is carried
out without the individual's volition: he is not aiming at the end.
It is simply natural law which, with many varieties of living beings
before it, exterminates the unfit individuals. Thus nature in its own
blind way produces a result of the same kind as that which the will of
man would bring about by subjective selection.

The origin of this term 'natural selection' is overlooked when people
talk glibly about 'natural selection' of ideas. Darwin used the term
'natural selection' because he thought he saw an analogy between the
tendency of nature and the selective purposes of intelligent beings.
It was because nature, working without intelligence, produced the same
kind of result as man does by intelligent selection, that he ventured
to use this term 'selection' of the process of nature. Perhaps he was
hardly justified in adopting the term, as nature does not select; she