cannot be properly applied so as to explain the conflict of moral
ideas. It is not able to account for all the phenomena of the
competition between groups. Even in sub-human life there are
indications of the processes which supersede natural selection. From
this result the ethical consequence may be drawn, that there is no
good ground for taking the lower, the less developed, method of
selection as our guide in preference to the higher and more developed.
Surely we are not to take natural selection as the sole factor of
ethical import because we see it at the crude beginnings of life on
this earth, while the process of life itself in its higher ranges
passes beyond natural selection. The physiological interpretation
of life and conduct put forward by Nietzsche, and by a good many
biological philosophers, would take natural selection, and its bearing
upon the animal nature of man, as the sole test of efficiency and
ethical value. But this interpretation of man's life disregards the
achievements of evolution itself for the sake of pinning its faith to
the humble beginnings of the organic process.

After this long enquiry into the nature and scope of natural
selection, we should be better prepared to understand the degree and
kind of ethical significance which can be rightly assigned to the
theory of evolution. In the first place let us consider the now
familiar claim that man must be taken as part of the cosmos, and that
man's conduct must be regarded and studied in its place in the cosmic
process. At the time when it was first made this claim may have seemed
a startling one; but I think that we must admit that, keeping to their
own ground and using the instruments that are theirs by right, the
evolutionist writers have succeeded in showing man's connexion with
the animal kingdom and with organic life generally, and thus his place
in the whole cosmic process. The claim must therefore be admitted.